Clinicians as recruiters to dementia trials: Lessons from the EVIDEM-E project

‘Evidenced based interventions in dementia’ (EVIDEM: www.EVIDEM.org.uk) is a 5-year research & development programme aiming to explore, evaluate and improve the quality of community based dementia care (Iliffe et al., 2008). The EVIDEM programme, like most clinical trials, relies on clinicians to recruit participants. Key NHS Stakeholders support was strong for EVIDEM and so we anticipated straightforward recruitment. However, this has not been the case; from a population exceeding 2000 people with dementia, one EVIDEM trial (EVIDEM-E: http://www.evidem.org.uk/projects/evidem-e.htm) recruited 6 participants over 6 months through clinical teams, despite minimal exclusion criteria. Our enquiries suggested that this was due to clinicians not distributing invitations, rather than a lack of interest from people with dementia and their carers. With recruitment alarmingly low and struggling to understand the incongruity between verbal support and limited promotion of the study, we invited team managers, nurses, occupational therapists, physiotherapists and psychologists to a facilitated roundtable discussion on their perceptions of research, impediments to their role as recruiters and ways to enhance recruitment.