Last year 21 government and philanthropic groups promised to change the way they work. They committed to writing new policy to ensure that all the clinical trials they pay for report their results. This group of funders joined the World Health Organization’s statement on registering and reporting trials and promised to have their new working policy in place within a year. The first 14 of them joined in May 2017. They should have adopted their new policy by the end of this month. So on June 1st, we’re going to find out if they have.
On 1st June, Ben Goldacre and Nick DeVito will audit the public policies on clinical trial transparency of the group of 14 funders. Ben and Nick will spend the day finding the funders’ policies, assessing what they promise, filling out the audit form and scoring the groups. Check in with us throughout the day via #AllTrials on Twitter to find out how we’re are getting on and whether funders’ policies seem to be any good.
You might have seen that Ben’s team in the EBMDataLab in Oxford recently found that most funders don’t currently have a policy to ask for trials to be registered and reported. This is shocking. The requirement to register and report trials is moral, ethical, professional and legal, and institutions should have a policy and a public commitment to compliance.
Auditing organizations’ policies is time consuming but we think it’s really worth it. It will give us a great picture of which organizations are taking clinical trial transparency seriously. And we should be able to show other groups what a good policy looks like. Help support this by donating anything you can a