Author: MRN
The most critical part to executing clinical trials in the community? OUR NURSES! With both clinical and research experience, clinical research nurses (CRNs) are not just key when it comes to executing on trial protocol, they also play an important role in the patient and family’s experience participating in a clinical trial.
Nurses working in both traditional and community-based sites are often the first point of contact a patient will have with the clinical trial team. These nurses play a crucial role in informing the patient about trial participation, while reassuring them (and very often their caregivers) about what participation will involve.
Often patients are already very ill, and caregivers are stretched to the limit – it is in these moments that the kindness, understanding, professionalism, and the clinical research knowledge of our nurses truly show their incredible impact. Despite often busy schedules for both patients and nurses, we hear time and time again of MRN in-home nurses taking the time to talk to the patient and their caregivers and building relationships that are meaningful, and are often the reason patients remain engaged and continue to participate in the trial. An MRN nurse greeted at the door with cookies or invited to stay for a meal is not uncommon. In-home trial delivery provides patients with the convenience of participating in a trial from home while receiving 1 to 1 care by a trained, highly skilled healthcare professional.
MRN’s Site & Patient Support (S&PS) nurses often work with community-based sites, where clinical research teams are usually the most understaffed and require additional help in order to run the clinical trial. These nurses take on an additional role to reassuring and supporting patients – they also need to reassure and support the permanent study site team.
These amazing nurses rapidly integrate into the site by gaining an understanding of what the site requires, and what the community the serve needs. They are then able to help connect with patients and help drive recruitment, while supporting patient retainment and engagement.
Andrea Sainz, one of MRN’s S&PS nurses and coordinators in Spain, shares just how important it is to support community clinical trial sites:
“Part of our role is to improve the identification of potential patients, which increases recruitment and immediately takes some of the workload off the site team. We are also able to make ourselves more available to patients, ensuring they feel both comfortable and cared for, and this helps with retention. We serve as a link between different teams and the patients, and ensure patients are at the center of what we do.”
For solutions like Home Trial Support, CRNs are usually the healthcare providers (HCPs) visiting the patient’s home (depending on regulatory requirements)
These incredible caregivers take on the crucial task of making the patient and, often, their family feel safe and comfortable in their home environment. They take the greatest care to be culturally sensitive and calm in what can sometimes be quite a stressful environment. The HTS solution is designed to have checks in place so that each patient’s space is respected when visited by a MRN nurse. This ensures that the patient does not feel as if the nurse, and by extension, the trial, has, for lack of a better term, “invaded” their space.
MRN’s HTS solution includes a range of procedures that can be completed in the patient’s home. Some, such as centrifugation, are not typically completed by nurses at hospital sites. Our MRN nurses will have undergone additional training – enabling them to perform clinical tasks, for example complex labs, as well as the training needed to follow the study protocol.
HTS nurses also play a vital role in connecting the study team with the patient. While the patient-study team relationship is important and encouraged, the HTS nurse can observe the patient more keenly in their day-to-day lives. This in turn means they are able to feedback to the study team should they observe any additional needs the patient may have, or any concerns they may have for the patient’s well-being. This insight is invaluable, and almost impossible to gain in a traditional site setting.
Former MRN HTS nurse, Elaine Nguyen, shared just how important the HTS nurses are in not only delivering this decentralized clinical trial solution but also how key their work can be to giving patients the care they need:
“As a HTS nurse, you are doing so much more than just collecting data – you are bridging the gap between clinical research and compassionate care. For many patients, especially those who are vulnerable or have limited mobility, our visits aren’t just convenient — they’re essential. We make it possible for them to participate in life-changing trials without leaving the safety and comfort of their home.”
CRN’s face a delicate balancing act with both the clinical precision with which the trial protocol needs to be executed and the quality of care that the patient should receive, regardless of location.
And no matter how difficult their work and the balancing act they are managing at both the site and in the home, nurses show up in a big way, every day, for research and for their patients.