Stakeholder perspectives on challenges and solutions to recruiting care home residents to vaccine clinical trials
Author Identifier (ORCID)
Abstract
Care home (CH) residents are routinely excluded from vaccine trials. The COVID-19 pandemic disproportionately affected the care home population, and the highest number of COVID-19 deaths across the world were reported from care homes. Regardless of the heavy impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, care home residents were heavily under-represented in COVID-19 vaccine trials. Apart from COVID-19, other infections such as influenza, parainfluenza virus, Respiratory Syncytial Virus, pneumococcus, and Norovirus are highly prevalent in care home residents and cause significant morbidity, mortality, and hospitalization and in turn increase the burden on the hospital. Vaccines are pivotal to preventing infections and reducing disease severity, and adverse outcomes among care home residents as well as healthcare costs. Nonetheless, vaccines that had been tested in a relatively healthy adult population are unlikely to be as effective in a much older care home population as factors such as frailty, immunosenescence, malnutrition, and multimorbidity significantly reduce the immune response and vaccine efficacy. Therefore, to ensure that vaccines are safe and effective in the care home population, the vaccines should be tested in the representative population who will receive the vaccine once it is approved. However, recruiting frail care home residents with complex care needs into clinical trials is time-consuming and is particularly challenging. To enable the recruitment of care home residents into vaccine trials, a group of experts in vaccine trials and care home research in Scotland set up the Widening Access to Trials in Care Homes (WATCH) project. As part of the Work Package 2 in the WATCH project, this qualitative study will explore the perspectives of various stakeholders such as pharmaceutical industry members, clinical trial regulators, healthcare professionals, researchers, care home professionals, and care home residents and relatives on the recruitment of care home residents to vaccine trials. This will enable an in-depth understanding of the complex recruitment process, which will inform the development of guidance for planning future trials in the care home population.
Keywords
Care home (CH), Care home (CH) residents, COVID-19, pandemic, care home population, vaccine, vaccine trials
Document Type
Other
Date of Publication
2025
School
School of Medical and Health Sciences
Links and/or Documentation
https://archive.org/details/osf-registrations-2gsny-v1
Associated project: https://osf.io/q7xs5
Content Type
Metadata only
Recommended Citation
Subbarayan, S., Stewart, C., Drummond, M., Ashworth, R., Shenkin, S. D., Vasan, S. S., & Soiza, R. (2025, July 15). Stakeholder perspectives on challenges and solutions to recruiting care home residents to vaccine clinical trials. https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/2GSNY