In August, a paper of Dr. Sharmind Neelotpol, Assistant Professor, Department of Pharmacy, BRAC University has been published in BMJ Open. The article titled 'Challenges in collecting clinical samples for research from pregnant women of South Asian origin: evidence from a UK study’ emphasized on the importance of developing trust and confidence between participant and researcher for conducting an effective clinical and epidemiological study in ethnic minority population.
An effective clinical trial always requires an equal participation of people from all communities. Less involvement of participants from South Asian and ethnic minority may greatly affect the generalizability of findings which may ultimately cause dissimilarities in accessing healthcare. However, it is observed that, recruitment of participants, especially from ethnic minority group imposes a great challenge for the researcher for conducting clinical trial. For this reason, it is also sometimes described as the ‘sole major workload component’ as well as the most ‘difficult process’.
In any clinical or epidemiological study, recruitment of participants from ethnic minority always entails ‘cultural sensitivity’ and ‘cultural competence’ which involve conversion of this sensitivity into the method and implementation of the research. Although the barrier in recruiting participants from ethnic minority is identified by all as multifactorial, it still remains as a vague concept to most of the people. The article titled 'Challenges in collecting clinical samples for research from pregnant women of South Asian origin: evidence from a UK study’ has attempted to describe the challenges in recruiting South Asian pregnant women residing in United Kingdom into a clinicoepidemiological study and to retain these participants for further bioanalysis. The chief investigator developed an innovative participant retention method in this regard, involving women’s cultural and religious practices. The method proved to be a successful one and were able to retain participants for about 5 months for further bioanalysis.