Meningitis Research Foundation (MRF) is hosting a meeting in Bristol today with eight partner organisations who are involved in a project called I-Consent which aims to develop guidelines to improve informed consent for clinical trials.
Informed consent is a process which allows patients to voluntarily decide their participation in research. Currently, informed consent documents are often long and complicated, using technical language which is not always easy to understand.
I-Consent is a research project funded by the European Union H2020*. Its main objective is to develop comprehensive guidelines on how to present Informed Consent to patients in a way that facilitates the patient’s autonomy when deciding whether or not to take part in clinical research.
The purpose of the two-day meeting, which starts today, will be to review progress made and to discuss how the outputs of the work completed so far can be best utilised to enable the project to achieve its objectives. The meeting will also be used to discuss the strategy for delivering the next stage of the project.
MRF’s role within the project so far has been to ensure that the patient perspective is considered in the development of improved guidelines for informed consent, resulting in the informed consent process being more patient friendly.
MRF’s interest in participating in this project is that by improving recruitment to clinical trials and advancing clinical research into new vaccines and treatments, this will ultimately help reduce cases of meningitis and septicaemia.
*This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement No 741856.
For more information about the project visit: https://i-consentproject.eu/project/