Recruitment of Participants for Dementia Research: Interprofessional Perspectives From Primary care-based Memory Clinics

Abstract

Aim: To understand clinician attitudes and the barriers that impede research recruitment from specialized primary care-based memory clinics. Materials & methods: Clinicians completed a survey on attitudes and barriers to research recruitment from memory clinics. Results: Comfort and willingness to recruit for research were low to moderate and were lower for drug trials than for observational and non-drug trials. Respondents believed that it is important to have a standardized recruitment process. Identified barriers provide some insights into the factors that contribute to discomfort and lack of willingness to recruit research participants. Discussion: Findings can inform future efforts to develop a recruitment process that addresses identified barriers, while also providing an opportunity to increase participant recruitment in dementia research.

Plain Language Summary

Recruitment of persons living with dementia from primary care for research is challenging and can be a barrier to study completion. Multispecialty Interprofessional Team (MINT) Memory Clinics may provide a unique opportunity for recruiting patients for research studies. In this study, clinicians completed a survey on attitudes and barriers to research recruitment from memory clinics in primary care. Clinician comfort and willingness to recruit for research were low to moderate. A number of barriers to recruiting patients for research from MINT Clinics were identified and included limited time, workload issues, limited information to share with patients, and their lack of knowledge about and experience with research. These study findings can help to develop a recruitment process that addresses identified barriers and helps to increase participant recruitment in dementia research.

Tweetable abstract

Barriers exist to recruiting research participants from primary-care-based interprofessional memory clinics. Addressing these barriers has the potential to increase recruitment for dementia research.

Keywords:

• clinical trials
• dementia
• memory clinics
• primary care
• research recruitment

Author contributions

L Lee: study concept, design, data interpretation, manuscript draft and final approval. J Locklin: study design, data collection, analysis, and interpretation, manuscript draft and final approval. T Patel: study concept, design, data interpretation, manuscript draft and final approval. SK Lu: study design, data interpretation, manuscript draft and final approval. LM Hillier: data analysis, and interpretation, manuscript draft and final approval.

Financial & competing interests disclosure

This study was financially supported by the Centre for Family Medicine, with the provision of salary support for J Locklin and SK Lu. The authors have no other relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript apart from those disclosed.

No writing assistance was utilized in the production of this manuscript.

Ethical conduct of research

The authors state that they have obtained appropriate institutional review board approval or have followed the principles outlined in the Declaration of Helsinki for all human or animal experimental investigations. In addition, for investigations involving human subjects, informed consent has been obtained from the participants involved.

Data sharing statement

Data is available from the authors upon request.

Notes

^†Unless otherwise noted all questions were rated on a 5-point rating scale (1 = not at all; 5 = extreme value).