Addressing equity in clinical trials: development of a rural clinical trials research program

Clinical trials are essential for the development and optimization of medical therapies. However, clinical trial access is limited in rural and small communities in Canada. This is an important health equity issue as rural populations often to not have the opportunity to access investigational therapies and clinical trial results often do not reflect the health of rural populations. This project, which is funded by the CANTRAIN Clinical Trials Training Program, Michael Smith Health Research BC, the Accelerating Clinical Trials Consortium and the Canadian Institutes for Health Research. This project aims to build a rural clinical trials program in the East Kootenay region of British Columbia. It will build develop partnerships among educational institutions, Interior Health and community organizations. A community advisory board will be developed to seek community input into the program development and clinical trial selection. The principal investigator is Dr. Denise Jaworsky who is a rural general internal medicine specialist, but this project is a collaboration among a team of researchers from Interior Health, UBC and College of the Rockies. This project aims to improve clinical trial access for populations in the East Kootenay region and develop models and best practices to support rural clinical trial access in other rural communities in Canada.

 

 

End of Award Update – December 2024

 

Results

This project laid the foundation for the development of a rural clinical trial program in Cranbrook, BC. We have hired and trained a clinical research coordinator and engaged over 15 students (nursing and medical) in this project. We have begun to establish the infrastructure and policies necessary to conduct clinical trials in the East Kootenay Region. We have also started the site initiation process to bring two clinical trials to Cranbrook. We hosted a two-day workshop on Indigenous Peoples’ engagement in research in partnership with Michele Sam (Ktunaxa scholar), Stephanie Obara (nursing instructor) and College of the Rockies. This workshop was funded by the Canadian Race Relations Foundation.

 

Impact

While we are not quite ready to enroll participants in clinical trials in our community, we expect to be able to do so in the next few months.

Our work was presented at the recent Rocky Mountain Internal Medicine Conference by internal medicine resident, Sabrina Martini (born and raised in Cranbrook), where it won an award for best quality improvement poster:

Martini S, Stewart Q, Jaworsky D, Keefer S, Curran J, Hawe N, Obara S, Sam M, Siemens J. Building Clinical Research Capacity in Rural Communities: Developing a Clinical Trial Program in the East Kootenays. Rocky Mountain Internal Medicine Conference. Rocky Mountain Internal Medicine Conference, Canmore, November 14-15, 2024

 

Potential Influence

The goal of this project is to develop, implement and study a rural clinical trial program so that we can create tools to support other rural communities to build clinical trial programs. Ultimately, it will help to address geographic inequities in clinical trial access.

 

Next Steps

Our next steps are to: