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Surgical Research Collaboratives | Kenneth McLean

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Summary

This on-demand teaching session is relevant to medical professionals and discusses collaborative research models. It explains what collaborative research is and the potential benefits, challenges and complexities involved in it. Participants will understand the process of multi-center research and will learn about how to be appropriately recognized for their contribution to the project. They will learn about the challenges of coordinating large groups of medical professionals, why local consultants and experts are important, and why a collaborative authorship model is important. The session is set up to help medical professionals understand how to get involved in collaborative research and how to get the most out of it.

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Description

Preparing for a Career in Surgery | Surgical Research Collaboratives | Kenneth McLean

Learning objectives

Learning Objectives:

  1. Explain the purpose of collaborative research in medicine.
  2. Identify the key components and roles of a researchers in a collaborative research study.
  3. Illustrate the benefits of collaborative research studies compared to single center audits.
  4. Describe the challenges of organizing and coordinating large collaborative research studies.
  5. Recognize the importance of collaborative authorship and why it should be included in research outputs.
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Computer generated transcript

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The following transcript was generated automatically from the content and has not been checked or corrected manually.

He's a PhD fellow, and he is our national research collaborative NRC asset representative. Thank you, Kenneth. Brilliant. Thanks very much. So I'll just get it all set up. And I always like to be able to chat and, uh, update everyone on a collective stuff so fantastic that should be all set up there. And so, yes, thanks very much for the introduction. So hopefully people will be broadly aware about surgical research captives and certainly become a much sort of a bigger thing in the past, you know, 5, 10 years and that kind of thing. So this is a little talk about, you know, 10 1 who's not familiar with them? A little bit. About what? Collaborative researches as well as you know why and how. You know, you should really be getting involved in this kind of stuff. So let's start with, you know, very basic question. What is collaborative research in the first place? So, the way I guess a lot of kind of audits have worked in the past, and certainly can research has worked in the past is that everyone sort of doing their own thing. So, you know, say you want to do an audit on, uh, DVT prophylaxis. Let's let's do something basically that kind of thing So often, you know, everyone at each of the hospital will be auditing their local department on DVT prophylaxis. Everyone has slightly different designs. Collect slightly different data might have. Let's say you collect over a week. You've got 20 patients who come in and have surgery at each center. Um, say there's 15 centers. So that is, you know, uh, do about 300 patients across all those all those centers. But each is sort of in the only silo each, you know, can't necessarily say anything beyond you know what's happening at that center and that kind of stuff. So that's certainly very useful for improving local practice. But it's not necessarily good for understanding. How good is your hostile compared to other hospitals? How can we improve standards for patients at a sort of larger scale? Um, so that's where the sort of collaborative research model comes in. That instead of everyone sort of doing their own thing, everyone collecting data on their own sort of individual patients, what happens is all you know, a variety of different centers take part and they pull their data together. So instead of having lots of single center audits, you've got potentially one multi center audit. So you have everyone pulling data together. Be able to say something a bit more meaningful about those patients about the standard of care, potential outcomes and that kind of stuff. So instead of having 15 20 patient audits, you've got 1 300 patients audit, which allows you to do much more. And and the way these are kind of set up is that you've got these certain individual sites where you've got people who are collecting data, you know, maybe doing some validation around, making sure that the data collected is accurate. And it's including all the relevant patients. And they're presenting the data back to the local departments about their center. And then you also often have people who are acting as sort of hostile lead, so they kind of have overall responsibility at that site for making sure that, you know audit approvals are in place. Making sure that you know the data completeness is is as good as possible and that kind of stuff and then you you've got the people who are you know, coordinating things more centrally. So they are often people who are designing the protocol and determining what the audit standards are in the first place, often with consultation with different experts in the field, and are sort of coordinating the whole process, supporting these local centers to kind of take part, and so often they have kind of a local branch is and then that sort of central group who's organizing and coordinating things. And one of the sort of really, really important things about collaborative research in general is that there is a collaborative authorship. And so the kind of idea is that, you know, people are recognized for the work they do towards these different projects. Um, So, for instance, here's an example paper from, uh, the Research collaborative, which some of you might have been familiar with. Basically, it has, um, the collaborative as a sort of as the author. But then it makes sure to have basically everyone who's involved from the people organizing it right through to people who are collecting data at the hospital and that kind of thing, and all have their names on pop meds as collaborators for this kind of thing, and you can have thousands and thousands of people like that who are involved in that basis. So that makes sure that, you know, as people get appropriate recognition and often journals, you know, journal essentially wouldn't allow that many authors on the paper formal authors on the paper. But it's making sure that, you know, everyone is actually recognized for the for the work they do, um, and recognized according to the rules so often it will list in the in the appendix exactly what someone's been involved in. So if you're involved in a hostel lead, a little issue is that if you're involved as a debt collector, it'll list you in that, um so make sure that when you go to potential applications to try and evidence this kind of thing, you know, people know exactly what your role in these things were. Um, so the kind of benefits of this kind of approach there are a lot of potential ones. So, for instance, you can do more sort of multi center stuff because you're getting lots of different centers involved. You inherently have larger samples as a result of that kind of thing, so It means you can get potentially lots of patients involved over a very short amount of time and be able to answer, you know, potentially quite big questions and, you know, across these different centers to be able to understand, not just and audit adherence at your center but potentially Inter center variation. And why does that occur all that kind of thing. So that's really good for kind of raising the standard of, you know, care for for all patients who are involved and and that sort of leads into, you know, making the center. Making the findings a bit more general is herbal. So, um, if you've got, you know, just one center, you know your center, you've collected 20 patients. You know, you don't necessarily know if those 20 patients are generalized able to the next 20 patients. You don't know if you know. Perhaps your center is a very, um, high volume, very sort of specialized tertiary center. Maybe it's got a lot of, you know, academic interest in that department, and so and that can think maybe it is abnormally high adherence or potentially opposite abnormally low adherence to different standards. So having these sort of multiple centers involved allows you to sort of compare across. Making sure that your overall findings are actually more generalized to the kind of the the rest of the centers also allows a bit easier to engage. So so certainly breaking into an academic research, academic surgery, that kind of thing, it can be quite difficult. It's very difficult to know kind of where to start or how to get involved and so on. And so this often provides a sort of easy way for people to kind of get started if you're not familiar with all of it, if you're not familiar with research, because basically this sort of central group essentially designs it for you and and kind of supports you in delivering it locally. And so it kind of means that you're kind of task, I guess is sort of more focused. And it's, you know, getting making sure you're getting local approvals, making sure you can collect data, being able to find the date and so on that kind of thing. So it kind of introduce you, introduce you to the I guess concept of research and audit and takes away some of the sort of concerning things of, you know, how do I go about saying these things in the first place? How do I get people involved and that kind of thing That's often, um, taken on or kind of led by the kind of more central group. Uh, and as I say, everyone gets kind of appropriate and fair credit for the efforts. So it kind of means that you know, often, you know, perhaps in these sort of bigger studies that aren't necessarily done in this sort of model, Often sometimes if it's just including authors and not including collaborators. People who have collected data or have done other aspects of the study aren't always necessarily listed as formal authors because for kind of slightly complicated reasons to do with how journal sort of view, authorship versus collaborators and that kind of thing. Sometimes people just don't meet the criteria for being able to be listed as authors and kind of make sure that actually making sure that everyone is listed as a collaborator makes make sure that actually people are fairly accredited for the work they do is, uh, first part of these projects. Uh, there are lots of challenges though with this sort of approach, it is immensely difficult to try and coordinate large groups of doctors and medical students that can think to actually do this and speaking as as someone who's been involved in that sort of central coordination, that kind of stuff really, really difficult sometimes to get the message out, to get everyone registered in time to get everyone their approvals in time and so on. So people are able to actually participate in that kind of stuff, so certainly kind of difficult from a central point of view and also difficult to be able to actually get a sort of a good idea for, you know, important topics in surgery. So what is the topic? And then how is that best address? So what? What standards should be? The auditing? How should we be collecting data for it? And that kind of thing goes through kind of months and, you know, several, um, rounds of changes to all these kind of things, consultation with experts in the field and so on to be able to actually sort of produce something like that. So that's certainly, uh, challenging to do, um, and also requires you know again. That level of some expertise requires, um, local collaborators, often to find a local consultants that will be willing to kind of supervise them to kind of support them to deliver things. Um, often, uh, you know, you'll be experts. That they'll be experts in the kind of local process is to get things approved and so on. And so that can often be a challenge. When you know, you're kind of waiting for, um, what seems like months and months and months for an audit department to approve something. Whereas the center across the way, it managed to get this done in two weeks. So that's certainly adds a bit of pressure to things, particularly when there's set data collection deadlines. Um, and, you know, running these kind of things. It does require a lot of kind of goodwill from, you know, consultants and from this collectors and from you know, where all this data is going to be stored in that kind of things. So it does require, um, you know, a fair amount of kind of backing behind it to be able to actually run these projects. Okay, so hopefully that gives you kind of idea of, um, you know what is collapsing research. And then let's talk a little bit about you know, how and why to kind of get involved in it. So as I can say, these collaborative have been around for over a decade now, and we've kind of gradually increased the interest over the time. Much more sort of different groups are being set up. The whole model is kind of expanding because it's kind of recognized. This is a good way to to kind of audit and and do research on topics in a sort of, um yeah, you know, large scale and, you know, done quite quickly. Um, so certainly, at least in the sort of more general surgical surgical type field. And this sort of went from, uh, in sort of 20 1206 centers were sort of the number that participated in these sort of different audits over time. And actually, as we kind of going along pretty much every center in the UK, at least in in the sort of general surgery field has gotten involved in these kind of things. Um, so you know, it's people are becoming much more familiar with how these are run and tends to kind of be the less of a novel concept, two different audit department and that kind of thing. And certainly if you're center has not been involved or you're especially, hasn't been involved in these kind of things. And, you know, or maybe there's not necessarily a collaborative that's kind of been set up for for your particular especially, you know, why don't you sort of think about sort of engaging or setting one of these kind of things up yourself? And I guess I sort of want to get involved in the first place. So patients ultimately the center of kind of everything we do and why should we should be doing this? And so ultimately, all this is for patient benefit. By auditing against these standards, we can identify where we're falling short of where we should be and that can be reported back to local centers, intervention to put in place. We all that's done in the future and that kind of thing to ultimately improve the standard of care of all. And ultimately, that is why we should all be doing this. Um also got very good aspects around some personal development. So certainly if you've not really been involved in research before or you've not necessarily been involved in that sort of leadership hostile leadership, point of view from things and that phrase an opportunity of you to develop and gain these skills and in a way that that is sort of fairly well supported by that sort of central team. And there's often opportunities for, you know, getting experience as a debt collector, getting experience to the local lead and getting experience, as you know, coordinating cross regions, that kind of thing. So it's kind of opportunities for progression within these different groups as well. Also, fantastic opportunity. If we kind of certainly networking at the very minimum locally so often, you know, if your debt collector or hostile you're interacting with consultants or or other training is within the department, be able to sort of get those sort of conversation is going to be able to understand how these things work in the department locally and and that kind of thing. So great opportunity for getting to know people within a sort of structured environment. And I think last and probably hopefully should be kind of you know, at least in general, of all these things, but still valuable is that sort of see the building aspect. And so it does mean that you know, you are going to be listed as a medical collaborators on every publication that results from that project. That sort of using your data. And you know, those kind of things can be used in your RCPs to demonstrate engagement and audit in research, and it can be used in applications. So it's I speak may be specifically about CT applications that collaborative publications are recognized as part of the, um, the kind of publication aspect of things. So if you get if there's multiple publications from Collaborative and that's counted as as additional points in your in your portfolio, it's also increasingly starting to be used as a part of the evidence for CCT and in different specialties. So these are kind of great opportunities to kind of demonstrate and get an easy way to sort of engage in research If you're not necessarily wanting to be a sort of a leader in research leading all these things yourself and that kind of thing. If you want to just engage improve care locally. This is a great way to to show evidence of that. So hopefully that's a bit of convincing of why should get involved. So we talked a bit about different opportunities to get involved. And so the majority of collaborative, as you can expect, are in the sort of slightly larger specialties. So most of the collaborative, our general surgical collaborative or orthopedic collaborative, and there's ones which are run projects on national scales. So there's one's which, you know, every center, potentially in the UK or beyond. That kind of thing can get involved in these projects. And there's some which runs just regional projects so kind of more focused over a particular danger or so and that kind of thing and lots of kind of opportunities available locally to get involved in that kind of stuff. And often they provide even sort of easier opportunities. Given that you'll be able to sort of potentially meet these people you know, in person, you'll you'll maybe know them from your different rotations and that kind of thing and great ways to be able to sort of gain sort of local leadership in in the course of these and so I'll sort of go on. And then we can talk about how you might get in touch with these various different classes. But just like you know, there are ones out there. There's probably also one particular for general surgery in your your local greenery that you can get in touch with, Uh, and for everyone else who's not necessarily interested in general surgery. Orthopedics. And the good thing to know is there is, uh, for almost any of them there is a collaborative out there for you. So across the different sort of surgical specialties. And there tends to be, um, you know, one single national collaborative, which tends to provide opportunities for you so I'll not go through them all. But, you know, vascular surgery, urology, plastic surgery that I think there's one out there so you can certainly get in touch and see if they've got any projects ongoing. Um, if you're interested in cardiothoracic breast or Max fax, Unfortunately, at the moment there's not necessarily a collaborative who is the single people to go on regarding this? Um, so if there is one missing, if you're really enthusiastic and interested to engage in collaborative research. There's absolutely no reason why you can't be the one sort of setting this up and getting people engaged in that kind of stuff. So, um, there is opportunities out there if you want to sort of take them, okay? And certainly if you have seen any of this sort of collapses out there that are potentially interested and want to explore more and you can go to that website. So we've got a list of all the national and regional training research captives out there with their contact details with their social media D details, and they're there for you to be able to sort of get in touch. They always want to hear from people and whether or not just engage as a as a data collector, whether you want to lead a project locally, whether or not you want to get involved in in steering committee locally and that kind of thing, there's opportunities out there for for you and fantastic, So I'll end there. And if anyone has any questions and the sort of there's one sort of single group who kind of coordinates different Collaborative Collaborative, which is called the National Research Collaborative and Twitter account there, and so that's also a place to sort of get in touch, and we'll be able to potentially direct you to a collaborative that's suitable for your interest as well and that kind of stuff. But thank you very much. Have to answer any questions, or you do. Can you please share the link of the collaborative through research? So, yes, I'll put the direct link in in the in the channel the second. But essentially, if you navigate to that website, it's got all the information there for the various different parameters. Their, um Oh, fantastic a herd of Be first and please feel free to get in touch with NRC if you want to be sort of added two different websites and that kind of thing. Um, fantastic. Thank you very much, Kenneth, for that talk. I remember attending an N. R. C conference several years back and found it really inspirational, and it's a fantastic opportunity to get to see what different units are doing across the country and and even get involved as a medical student, foundation doctor or cold, rainy or training. So great to hear from you again. And, um, and we look forward to getting some of our delegates involved. Yeah. Fantastic. Great. Great. To have everyone involved if they want to be good stuff. Thanks, Kenneth.