Facilitators and Barriers to Early Recruitment: Observations from the RISKIT-CJS Pragmatic Randomised Control Trial

Pragmatic randomised control trials are recognised as high quality evaluative research of interventions in real-life settings. They are also recognised as complex, costly, and the recruitment process is often challenging. However, the findings and outcomes of such research can have important implications for the study population.

Facilitators and barriers to recruitment can be experienced across the various trial stages, recruitment processes and within the relational networks required for multi stakeholder collaboration. The facilitators and barriers affecting recruitment can impact the trial, the site, the participant, the clinical team, flow of information, consent, and the research team.

Working collaboratively with multiple stakeholders across multiple sites provides the potential for a wealth of recruitment opportunities. Relational networking provides a realistic view of the study population in context as well as an insight into stakeholders own challenges and demands when facilitating trial recruitment. When adding into the mix the trial requirements i.e. rigorous methods, ethics, respect of the research protocol and stringent data management and collection processes required for the trial, it is understandable that barriers will inevitably arise during the early recruitment process.

We will illustrate how facilitators and barriers have impacted upon the early stages of the recruitment of young people in the criminal justice system using recent examples from RISKIT-CJS. We will present early recommendations based on our experience that fluidity and flexibility reduces barriers and encourages facilitating strategies