One year ago, we launched our biggest ever policy report (June 20 2017) aimed at enhancing the use of scientific evidence in decisions about medicines.
This project was prompted by ongoing public debate around the benefits and harms of treatments such as statins, hormone replacement therapy (HRT) and Tamiflu, which had called into question the underlying scientific evidence upon which important health decisions were based.
The publication of an Academy policy report does not mark the end of a project, it signifies the start of a new phase of action: sharing the report’s findings and encouraging cross-sector implementation which you can read about below.
A collective call to action
The report made a series of recommendations aimed at improving the generation, trustworthiness and communication of scientific evidence. The overall aim is for evidence to play a more significant role in decisions about medicines by patients, carers, healthcare professionals and others.
The Academy cannot do this alone. This requires a collective response, which we kick-started shortly after the report’s launch with a workshop where key stakeholders from the biomedical sector identified areas to prioritise. We have continued to meet with relevant organisations and individuals and continue to champion and drive forward the recommendations within the report, turning the words into actions.
Trustworthy evidence
The public dialogue work that went into the report made it clear that much more needs to be done to help ensure trust in research that involves academia working with a commercial partner. This will become increasingly important as the Government seeks to implement its Life Sciences Industrial Strategy, in which a central pillar for delivery is collaboration across industry, the NHS, academia and research funders.
In August 2017, following the Academy’s report, the Medical Research Council published an Industry Charter to set the basis for their engagement with industry and summarise the values that underpin this engagement – integrity, clarity of purpose, independence and openness.
The Bioindustry Association have also produced a new best practice guide to help bioscience companies communicate their R&D clearly and effectively to the public and investment community, which responds to our report’s recommendations in this area.
Generating evidence more effectively
We highlighted the need for organisations involved in overseeing clinical researchers to provide training in research methods and the use of statistics as part of researchers’ continuing professional development. Professor Sir John Tooke FMedSci (Chair of the report’s Oversight Group) spoke at the Joint Academy Training Forum last autumn, which included representatives from all the Medical Royal Colleges developing their individual curricula, where he highlighted the need to address training gaps in statistics and research methods.
The Academy’s report also recommended that funders prioritise research into improving methodologies for analysing data from new sources of evidence, such as real world data. In January 2018, the Academy’s FORUM held a roundtable organised with the US National Academy of Medicine to scope and explore progress against some of the challenges of using real world evidence and to understand the key aspects that need to be addressed before it can be used more widely for medicines.
Improving the communication of scientific evidence
In response to our report, the Science Media Centre (SMC) has driven the development of a labelling system for press releases of medical research. This is meant to aid communication of the relevance of new findings to clinical application and to highlight the stage of the study. The SMC consulted other stakeholders throughout the development, and there was consensus early on to move away from the original plan of a traffic-light based system in favour of a text-label approach. This system has since been piloted in a number of research press offices, and the feedback so far has been very positive. We will be working with the SMC to help encourage its wider use across the sector.
Alongside this, our recommendations are being taken forward by Stempra (the network of science PR and press officers), which has indicated it will be updating its guide for press officers later this year to reflect our report. The MRC has also started work to develop a code of practice for grant awardees around how to describe in the media the science that they fund.
Engaging audiences
We have strived to reach new audiences through our report. At the time the report was published, we had a number of materials designed to help explain the report’s findings – including a dedicated microsite with animations on the key recommendations. The Academy produced a pocket guide for patients, providing a set of questions to ask their GP when considering whether to take a medicine. This was aimed at helping to support joint decision-making between healthcare professionals and patients, and has now been endorsed by the Royal College of GPs. We will be looking at ways that these could be used in GP practices.
We have also engaged press officers on our report through a number of events organised by Stempra, and early career researchers through the Academy’s regular programme of careers development events.
Continuing momentum
There are a number of areas of the report that will require ongoing engagement to help implement in the coming years, in particular on helping to change the current culture. Within universities, we believe the Research Excellence Framework presents an opportunity to encourage positive behaviours in areas such as reproducibility, publication, and communication of research, and we will continue to engage with Research England around the next REF in 2021.
We feel we’ve made good progress in the space of a year, but there is still plenty to be done to ensure that the generation, trustworthiness, and communication of scientific evidence is improved. The Academy will continue to look for opportunities to work with other organisations and individuals to help take this work forward.
Visit our Evidence Project microsite here