You didn’t think I’d forget NIHR Friday did you?

So the National Institute for Health Research Clinical Research Networks Co-ordinating Centre (NIHR CRN CC), together with The Guardian online, has this week published its annual performance tables for research activity in each NHS Trust in England for 2012/13.

You can find the figures for your local NHS Trust here. For each Trust data is provided on the number of clinical research studies recruiting during the year, along with the overall number of patients recruited into all studies.  Comparative figures are provided for 2011/12 so you can see whether activity has increased or not where you live.

Overall the news is very good indeed.  More than 630,000 people were recruited into clinical research studies.  That’s a 7% increase on the year before.  During the year NIHR CRN supported more than 4,200 studies and that’s a 12% increase on 2011/12.  There are some nice, simple summary reports available through the NIHR CRN CC website here (look for the pdfs at the end of the page).

A good year then.  But it can get better.  Hence the importance of the ‘Ok to ask’ International Clinical Trials Day (ICTD) campaign this year.

This week I was fortunate to see the early feedback and results from the campaign (in fact some of them are in my Leeds presentation which I posted yesterday).  There is much to celebrate.  You can be sure we will be continuing with the theme and perhaps we need to join-up the performance stats and the ‘Ok to ask’ activity in some way?  How about a ‘Rapid Reaction Ok to Ask’ taskforce to focus on the areas where we need to do most work?

Have a good weekend.