General practice-based clinical trials

Clinical trials should be relevant and tailored to the needs of general practitioners and their patients

Each year, around 90% of the public see their general practitioner.1 General practice therefore should be an excellent environment to conduct community trials, because that is where the people are and, ideally, research should be conducted where it is to be applied.2 In this article, I discuss why general practice may be a difficult place to conduct trials for those from a non-primary care background and the means to overcome these difficulties. The article is based on a presentation at the MJA Clinical Trials Research Summit last year. The emphasis here is on conducting clinical trials in general practice, and not on research capacity building in general practice or on GPs’ selection of trials to participate in.