Grant: Project Grant

Research is essential to provide high-quality, equitable care that answers the needs of patients. In primary care, which serves millions of Canadians and is often their first point of contact within the health care system, conducting research to improve care can be complex. Recruiting participants to participate in studies is challenging in the current context of limited resources, competing demands, and having to rely on healthcare professionals for referrals, which can lead to delays, incomplete projects, and missed opportunities to advance knowledge. The most commonly used recruitment methods do not allow researchers to contact potential participants directly: they must generally rely on healthcare professionals to identify eligible participants among their patients, explain the studies, and put them in contact. This method is generally slow, demanding for clinicians, and susceptible to favoring patients over others. A Permission-to-Contact for Research approach, meaning that patients are asked for permission to be contacted directly by researchers to discuss their interest in participating in a study, could help improve recruitment. We propose to refine and contextualized, in collaboration with patients, clinicians and organizations a system of Permission-to-Contact for Research that could be used in primary care clinics to recruit patients in an inclusive manner, and document how the approach has been adopted into practice from the perspective of patients, healthcare professionals, clinic staff and researchers. This project would help us understand how new approaches like Permission-to-Contact for Research are used in the healthcare system, while making it easier to do research that benefits patients.