UK Clinical Trials & Participant Payments: Experience From Across All Phases Of Research

By Sara Botha, Project Manager, Greenphire UK

Clinical trials have always fascinated me. The overwhelming questions and learnings clinical trials have raised over the past century have pathed the way in which clinical trials are conducted today and the betterment of human health through new treatment options. We all know it can take approximately 10 years for a drug to go from development to market, but not many people know the sheer number of clinical trials one drug must go through during that time.

I started my career in the clinic of a Phase 1 clinical trials unit in Nottingham, UK, where my day-to-day responsibilities were to perform procedures on clinical trial participants, collect the data outlined in the studies protocol and dose the participants with the experimental drug, eventually working my way up to be a project manager for independent Phase 1 clinical trials. Now at Greenphire, I’m a Project Manager II, and responsible for implementing our technology solutions for industry sponsors conducting global clinical trials. I’ve been able to simultaneously manage projects but also offer insights to my sponsor clients using my own research site experience.

One thing that unites these two experiences is patient engagement, specifically regarding payments. In this short blog, I’d like to discuss my observations regarding payments and how they’ve changed over time.