PHP53 - Successful Recruitment Strategies For Women Participation In Health Research Studies: A Meta-Analysis

Abstract

To evaluate and synthesize the evidence regarding effective and efficient interventions to enhance enrollment of women into health research study. Comprehensive search done in PubMed, EBSCO, and ProQuest databases looking for studies evaluating different recruitment interventions (RI) for women participation in clinical trials/observational studies. Studies were excluded if their target population did not specifically focus on women recruitment. We estimated the frequency of RI with which women were recruited by pooling across studies that presented data for RI used to enhance participation in HRS as proportions and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) for each RI using random-effects model. STATA (version 11.0) was used to perform the analysis. We analyzed 15 interventional studies (n=9266) and 5 observational studies (n=2536). RI were classified into four categories; Referral, Social marketing (SM), health system (HS) and community outreach (CO). SM used in 96%, referrals 77%, CO in 50% and HS 88% studies. In aggregate, SM lead to 63.9%(63–64.7), referrals 14.5% (13–15.2), CO 20%(19–22), and HS 13.6% (13–14.7) participant recruitment. SM was the most effective RI in 69% (14 of 20) of studies it was attempted. This study found that social marketing as most effective strategy in the studies it attempted compared to other intervention.The identification of such RI to enhance participation in HRS should help researchers to develop strategies that will keep to a maximum participation and cooperation in HRS, while informing and protecting prospective participants adequately.