Just one thing…

Last month (15-22 September) was National Eczema Week. This annual campaign aims to raise awareness about eczema – so of course the Rapid Eczema Trials team wanted to do our bit to mark the week and support such an important cause! We put our heads together and came up with the idea of making a …

Exploring community beliefs around clinical research

A wedding planner wouldn’t plan a wedding without input from the couple who are to be married… So why would anyone do health research without input from the populations that they’re hoping to help? Just like nearly weds will prefer certain arrangements over others, so will people find certain interventions more acceptable. And there’s no …

Talking eczema flare-ups

When studying something, we need to use words that everyone understands. That way, our findings make sense and can help people. Even common words like a “flare-up” in eczema can mean different things to different people. Everyone in the eczema world talks about “flare-ups” as a term for worsening of the eczema. But that is …

When the answers from health research are not what you want to hear

When the answers from health research are not what you want to hear, how do you make sense of them? Negative reactions, disagreement with the findings or disengaging with the research team will not make the results of a clinical trial change or disappear. But I have experienced all those responses when sharing results, which …

Getting out and about with Rapid Eczema Trials

The ‘traditional route’ for publicising research is to publish the results in scientific and medical journals and talk about what’s been done at scientific conferences. This means a lot of research is only accessible to a limited audience of other researchers and healthcare professionals. But patients and the public are users of research too and …