BMJ  2005;331:1271-1272 (26 November), doi:10.1136/bmj.331.7527.1271-c

Letter

Including care home residents in clinical research is fraught

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

EDITOR—Funders need to take account of issues related to including older people in clinical trials,¹ but including care home residents poses additional problems.

We have just completed a large clinical trial of a pharmacist conducting clinical medication reviews of elderly residents of care homes. Obtaining consent presented particular problems in this population with an average age of 85 and a standardised mini-mental state test score of 13. Even those residents who seemed to understand what was being asked of them had often forgotten all about it when our research assistant returned the following day to seek their signature. We needed to seek the assent of the nearest relative for half of our study population.

Not only is obtaining consent time consuming, but we also needed the agreement of home managers before we could even approach their residents. Arranging to see the residents was fraught because of the limited . . . [Full text of this article]

School of Healthcare Studies, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9UT
zermansky@btinternet.com

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