A new nurse-led study aims to break down the barriers that lung cancer patients face in accessing clinical trials and the innovative treatments they can offer.
The two-year study, being undertaken by researchers at Oxford Brookes University, will involve focus groups across NHS organisations in England and Scotland.
Participating patients, relatives and healthcare professionals will be asked about the barriers and enablers to clinical trial entry.
“We want to help patients to be able to make informed decisions about whether or not to access clinical trials”
Catherine Henshall
The initial results from the study will contribute to a resource to help cancer nurses make lung cancer patients aware of the clinical trial opportunities that are available to them.
It comes as statistics have shown that participation in lung cancer clinical trials has decreased in recent years.
Meanwhile, according to Cancer Research UK, there are around 48,500 new lung cancer cases in the UK every year, and around 34,800 lung cancer deaths.
Catherine Henshall, professor of nursing at the Oxford Institute of Applied Health Research and research lead at the Oxford Brookes school of nursing and midwifery, is chief investigator on the project.
Professor Henshall said: “Lung cancer doesn’t have high survival rates and we want to help patients to be able to make informed decisions about whether or not to access clinical trials.
“Lung cancer nurses are the professionals with a lot of patient-facing contact but they don’t necessarily always have access to information about the best ways to signpost lung cancer patients to relevant clinical trials opportunities, or how to talk to patients about the possibility of entering a clinical trial.”
Professor Henshall said the research team wanted to look at barriers to taking part in trials “and the opportunities for encouraging more patients to participate in them”.
She noted that one of the common barriers in accessing clinical trials was location, with many patients in rural areas unable to travel to a hospital that is conducting a clinical trial.
Meanwhile, others may not be in the headspace to think about clinical trials once they have received a diagnosis, said Professor Henshall, who is also the nursing, midwifery and allied health professional research lead at Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust.
She also highlighted inequalities in who was able to access clinical trials, as the recent National Cancer Experience Survey showed that the majority of people taking part in clinical cancer trials were White.
“We need to redress the balance to achieve greater ethnic diversity and get more people from less well-off backgrounds involved in these trials,” she stated.
Currently, the research team are drafting an academic paper on what the study hopes to achieve, why participation in lung cancer trials has been low and how the project hopes to improve medical professionals’ knowledge of these trials.
The information collected in the initial phases of the study will then inform the development of a resource to help cancer nurses make lung cancer patients aware of the trial opportunities available to them.
Professor Henshall said: “Once the nurses have had the opportunity to use the resource, we’ll survey them to find out whether it has been helpful.
“We need to know if it is implementable and acceptable to nurses to use alongside their day-to-day clinical practice,” she said.
“The aim is that, once the new resource is rolled out nationally, it will enable patients to have much better information about, and access to, new and innovative treatments from clinical trials that could ultimately save lives.”
The Roy Castle Lung Cancer Foundation has provided £147,000 in funding for the two-year study.
Its chief executive Paula Chadwick said: “Not only do clinical trials play a crucial part in giving patients and their families hope of more time together, they also help pave the way for further advances in the treatment of the disease.
“Lung cancer treatments have come a long way in recent years and this doesn’t happen without clinical trials and their participants,” she added.