Webinar: The role of process evaluation in clinical trials

celebrating 25 years of nursing image

Is it time to rethink our approach to clinical trials?

For the fourth and final webinar in the 25 Years of Nursing series by the Department of Nursing, Melbourne School of Health Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences, we invited an international panel of experts to assess the role of process evaluation to improve the impact, advancement and efficiency of clinical trial operations.

The event was presented by Professor Leanne Aitken, Professor of Critical Care and Associate Dean for Research & Enterprise at City University of London, the Melbourne School of Health Sciences’ own Professor in Implementation Science Jill Francis, along with Dr Claire Kydonaki from Edinburgh Napier University.

Click to hear a Sneak Peek with Professor Leanne Aitken

The discussion:

Health care interventions that are designed to improve outcomes frequently show promise in small, single centre trials but fail to result in benefit when replicated in other settings or scaled up to large studies. Understanding the reasons for these disappointing results, and improving our expertise in how to reproduce interventions, is essential. Process evaluation is particularly valuable when working with interventions that consist of multiple components to help understand the effect of the intervention overall, as well as potentially separating the effect of one component from another. This discussion will investigate and discuss how we could be doing things better, introducing perspective from leading UK universities City University of London and Edinburgh Napier University.

Find out more about our panelists

Photograph of Leanne AitkenProfessor Leanne Aitken City University of London.

Professor Leanne Aitken's program of research focuses on recovery after critical illness and injury and a range of clinical practice issues within critical care. Leanne is an Academic Title Holder with Griffith University, Australia and an Ambassador for the World Federation of Critical Care Nurses. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing, the Australian College of Nursing and the Australian College of Critical Care Nurses and is a Fulbright Alumnus. Leanne has published more than 150 original peer-reviewed publications and edits the textbook, Critical Care Nursing.

Photograph of Jill FrancisProfessor Jill Francis, University of Melbourne

Professor Jill Francis PhD is Professor of Implementation Science at the Melbourne School of Health Sciences; Implementation Lead in the Department of Health Services Research, Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre; and Affiliate Investigator at the Centre for Implementation Science, Ottawa Hospital Research Institute, Canada.

In 2020 she returned to Melbourne after 18 years in the UK, where she focused on behavioural implementation research to support practice change in health care. Jill has led several process evaluation studies in parallel with trials of complex interventions, largely in the context of implementation research projects.

Photograph of Lis Neubeck

Dr Claire Kydonaki,  Edinburgh Napier University

Dr Claire Kydonaki is a Lecturer in Adult Nursing, School of Health and Social Care at Edinburgh Napier University. Her areas of expertise include pathophysiology of Adult Health, critical care nursing, decision-making, quality improvement. She has over 10 years of clinical experience within the field of critical care nursing including bedside, and mentoring roles.

Her research work and focus are on critical care including clinical decision-making, sedation and mechanical ventilation, psychological outcomes of critically ill patients, patient, and family centred care.