James Lind was the Royal Navy doctor in the 1700’s who invented the principle of clinical trials that is still in use today. The disease scurvy was rife in the Navy at that time and he tested the principle that it was the lack of fresh food available to sailors for long periods at sea that caused the problem. Making lime juice available was shown to cure the problem – and to this day British visitors are often referred to as ‘limeys’ as a result.
The modern-day James Lind Alliance (JLA) aims to be equally as innovative in order to extend the impact of clinical trials. Typically a modern clinical trial will test a new intervention against an existing intervention in order to advance medicine. This is done by medical doctors & researchers throughout the world and has been hugely successful, but it has been noted that the process could be improved in several ways.
In particular, it is noted that the opinions of patients on their most pressing have not been fully considered and after all, it is patients whom the process should be designed to help! JLA have set up a systematic process by which we can arrive at a top ten of patient priorities for a given disease. It would be of great benefit to all CPA patients if one such priority list was set up for CPA!
Once a JLA list of patient priorities is available, medical researchers can add a few of them to any grant requests they may write with the knowledge that they are more likely to get funding as most funders value patient priorities as important to address.
Researchers in London, Manchester, Nottingham and Dundee are writing a grant request that will allow us to set up a JLA priority list for CPA. To do this we need to have a focus group of patients to add their views to the application, so we need patient volunteers to help us do that. The group will first run on Thursday 4th April in the morning. If you can volunteer we will send you out an invite for the meeting. Meetings are all online using Microsoft Teams and you can access them on any computer/phone.tablet.
Please consider joining us, you will be helping all CPA patients achieve a world first! – contact graham.atherton@mft.nhs.uk