Intervention Trials Working Group

Trials are crucial to establishing whether potential interventions work and are safe.

The ongoing establishment of The Global Health Network's 'COVID-19 Working Groups' aims to address the discussion and gather consensus on the emerging COVID-19 research gaps across low-resource settings. This group was created to identify methods to enable better COVID-19 intervention trials. 

Around 170 researchers from across the globe working or wanting to work in intervention trials have come together in this group to discuss ideas, form collaborations, access funding as well as share outputs and resources that others can use. There is so much experience that can be applied here - let’s use that to help this immediate need for supporting research everywhere there are cases, now!

Current Work

On the 27^nd May, The Global Health Network supported the first virtual team meeting for the ‘Intervention Trials Open Working Group’. 

The meeting was organised in response to questions raised in our recent COVID-19 workshops which highlighted the need for greater discussion of the impact that COVID-19 pandemic and which interventions might work.

Mixed methods platform trial: 

Following this first meeting, there has clearly been a loud call for community-based research and the need for mixed method studies to be planned to evaluate public health interventions.

Moving forward, team leaders met and decided that this working group will be designing a protocol which anyone can use in their setting with a robust methodology for people to use freely. Platforms and initiatives like this also have the opportunity to drive the research agenda and funding for relevant priority research question.

Team leaders are meeting weekly and writing the first draft for the protocol. Please find minutes of those meetings (4/08/20 - 18/08/20 - 3/09/20). Discussions are ongoing

Best trial implementation practices during PHEs in LMICs:

A major hurdle to conducting clinical trials during PHEs is negotiating the challenge of ‘learning’ while providing the much-needed clinical care during a pandemic such as this one. Most places struggle with implementation challenges. We have already created few implementation walk-throughs on TGHN for various COVID-19 trials being done globally.

The coordination team aims at generating a dialogue to understand the capacity and what would be the best practices on trial implementation during a PHE for researchers. For this, the coordination team proposed a series of workshops addressing therapeutic clinical trials and vaccine trials. The team has been meeting and is preparing a two day workshop to be run soon. More information will follow.

Working Documents

Here you are able to find all the working documents from the different WGs for you to comment on;