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Objectives

The purpose of CONSCIOUS II is to create a curriculum that will train the clinical trialists of the future and provide them with the skills to design, conduct and manage multicentre clinical trials, and report their findings to the highest standard with the internationally agreed CONSORT statement. The planned e-learning material and curriculum, with world wide access, will meet the needs of our target groups - PhD students and early career researchers in the medical, science, pharmacy and health professions.

Objectives:


1. To design a clinical trial curriculum which will provide PhD students and early career researchers with the skills to design, conduct and report on clinical trials in their relevant disciplines.
2. To provide transferable interdisciplinary training to PhD students and early career researchers, focusing on leadership, scientific publishing and teaching so they have the tools to become clinical trial leaders in their respective fields.
3. To disseminate widely, through our respective Universities and partnerships, the finished curriculum, to make this training available to as many people as possible worldwide.
4. To standardize the clinical trials curriculum in Europe, to raise awareness of and disseminate the best practices in the field of clinical trials education.
5. To reinforce the existing cooperation in the field of clinical trials education in Europe, by continuing and further strengthening the collaboration with ECRIN partners.

Results:

Our project outcomes will be as follows:

1.

A freely available 9 lesson clinical trial curriculum for postgraduates, specifically PhD students and early career researchers in the medical, science, pharmacy and health professions.

2.

A freely available 3 lesson curriculum focused on transferable interdisciplinary training, to provide the skills to each participant to lead a clinical trial and lead a team in their respective disciplines.

3.

We will address the gap identified by NIHR, namely the lack of support for people to lead their own clinical trials by providing that training in an easily accessible forum.

4.

We will address four of the five NIHR recommendations
- Increase flexibility and availability of training programmes for clinical trials training
- Increase dissemination of opportunities for clinical trials training
- Explore linking trials training into the broader research pathway
- Consider key skills for different stages of clinical trials training

The vision and cooperation between project partners is providing a solution to a real-world problem, the lack of capacity to conduct high quality clinical trials, due to lack of training. CONSCIOUS II will address this and it will benefit all in society. Our project results will undoubtedly result in an increase in the conduct of clinical trials.
We anticipate that this will increase the evidence base for new drugs, devices and therapeutics across the health professions.