Rural, Regional and Remote Clinical Trial Enabling Program

Contact the Clusters on email links below to learn more about conducting clinical trials in these regions:

Clinical trials provide the most robust evidence to change clinical practice. Clinical trial involvement by patients, clinicians, and healthcare organisations offers early access to new treatments, skills, and medical technology; in turn generating significant economic, medical, and scientific benefits to the rural, regional, and remote areas of NSW and the ACT.

In rural, regional, and remote settings, populations have poorer health outcomes and shorter life expectancies than people living in metropolitan areas. Some communities also lack access to clinical trials and new products and therapies.

Clinical trials addressing the health needs of rural, regional, and remote populations are rare, resulting in a lack of evidence on how to improve practice in these settings. Barriers to research in regional areas have included geographical isolation, and lack of workforce experience, skills, and capacity.

R3-CTEP is building systems and workforce development and support to address the barriers.

Health care environments active in research and clinical trials achieve better outcomes for their participants.

A network of three Clusters has been established to facilitate and deliver clinical trials across geographical clusters of NSW and ACT – Northern, Southern and Western.

The Clusters

• represent a collaborative of Local Health Districts and Canberra Health Services.
• are working with partners across the health and research spectrum to design, implement and evaluate service models that can be scaled nationally
• hold the knowledge and expertise about clinical trial operations across their member Local Health Districts.
• are addressing their Clusters identified needs and
• are collaborating to build a sustainable clinical trial ecosystem across rural regional and remote areas of NSW and ACT.

Cluster Clinical Trial Support Units

Each cluster hosts a Clinical Trial Support Unit responsible for

• Supporting and facilitating clinical trials in all therapeutic areas across all trial sites
• Supporting local trial start-up and close-out
• Coordinating recruitment activities for trials within cluster and across clusters, as relevant
• Building a critical network of skilled staff based directly in R3 locations
• Developing and supporting local research/clinical leaders and championing business development services
• Facilitating academic trial expertise as needed, particularly to support the development of investigator-initiated capability in R3 locations.

The program has a series of Key Activity and associated projects. The projects are multifaceted and, in many ways, complementary, aimed at designing and embedding the infrastructure required for a sustainable clinical trials ecosystem.

Deliver clinical trials directly to the community: develop decentralised clinical trials capacity and capability	Involve communities in clinical trials: clinical trial awareness, engagement, recruitment, and retention	Conduct trials to international best practice standard: professionalise rural, regional, and remote clinical trial services	Support and develop the local workforce: deliver locally through rural, regional, and remote clinical trial support units	Governance and project coordination.

All enquiries related to the Executive Committee, the Advisory Group or other enquiries should be directed to MOH-RRR-CTEP@health.nsw.gov.au