Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has been named the top performing site in the North West for recruitment into clinical trials to date this year, recruiting 1,000 patients into clinical trials so far this year; a 25% increase on target.
Karen Partington, Chief Executive at Lancashire Teaching Hospitals, said: “As a leading research centre, research is extremely important to us to enable us to offer our patients and their families the high quality of care that they deserve.” “We are delighted that we are able to play such a big part in innovation and in developing ground-breaking treatments and results for the future through involvement in such practice changing clinical trials. We are committed to research and innovation within our hospitals, and to have such great achievements is testament to the fantastic staff that we have in our research teams, and the brilliant Clinical Research Facility which opened last year to provide an environment for these trials to take place.”
The NIHR Lancashire Clinical Research Facility, based at Royal Preston Hospital, was opened officially in November 2017 and is the only NIHR CRF in Lancashire. The centre provides patients in the Lancashire and South Cumbria area with the opportunity to be involved in clinical research across a wide range of health topics and conditions.
The research team have seen numerous achievements and successes recently; including recruiting the first patients in the UK into both a testicular cancer trial and a renal cancer trial, and also recruiting one of their oldest patients into an anaemia trial; a 92 year old patient. Most recently, the team have been successful at recruiting the first robotic patient into an international clinical trial looking at the outcomes of patients having minimally invasive surgery for rectal cancer.
Michelle Dorrington, Research Nurse at Lancashire Teaching Hospitals said: “We do research as a way of finding new treatments and improving current practices for our patients. Everything that we do now has been tried and tested in past years in order to become current practice. Therefore it is imperative that we continue to trial and test new treatments, drugs and practices of care to make sure that our patients are getting the best possible care available.”
You can contact the Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust research team by calling 01772 522031 or e-mailing [email protected].
Further information about our research department can be found here