Dear BIRD/ BINAstoria member,
We are pleased to invite you to participate in a new BIRD initiative, as part of the master thesis project “Building the perfect IBD clinical research unit” by KU Leuven master student Leonie Govaerts, who is doing her master thesis at BIRD under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Bram Verstockt and Ingrid Arijs.
As you are aware, dedicated clinical research units play a critical role in improving data quality, expanding research opportunities, and enhancing patient outcomes. By facilitating an interconnected IBD research network through BIRD, these units would promote collaboration between healthcare professionals, researchers, and various BIRD centres. Therefore, it is important to understand the resources required to set up an optimal IBD clinical research unit in both academic and non-academic settings, and to identify the hurdles for BIRD centres to participate in clinical studies.
With this master thesis, we aim to create a structured questionnaire to address these issues and disseminate among all BIRD centres, aiming to gain deeper insight into the resources available and determine where we, as organisation, can offer support and improvements to establish optimal IBD clinical research unit in the future across the country.
Therefore, we will use a 2 or 3-round Delphi process. Participating in this project means that you are willing to complete two or three questionnaires, and we explicitly asked that only one person per stakeholder group in your unit will complete the survey (1 physician and 1 study coordinator or study nurse). In the first round you will be asked to complete a questionnaire with multiple choice questions and some open questions. Based on the responses from this first round, a second round will be developed. In these following round(s), you will be asked to evaluate a series of statements and quality indicators, rating their importance.
If you are willing to participate, which we are very thankful for, please complete the first questionnaire before February 15th by clicking the link provided below:
English: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/HR8S5SL
French: https://fr.surveymonkey.com/r/HSBBVPM
Once all answers from the first round have been processed, you will be invited to re-evaluate your answers in a second questionnaire.
If you have any questions about this project, or technical problems when completing the questionnaire, please contact leonie.govaerts@birdgroup.be (with Ingrid.arijs@birdgroup.be in cc).
We thank you in advance for your interest in this project and look forward to a fruitful collaboration, ultimately aiming to further improve Belgian IBD research in the future.
