Broadening the Scope Through the Clinical Trials NetworkPosted on January 20, 2009 Dr. José Szapocznik explains that the Clinical Trials Network helps translate research findings into clinical practice. |
For a number of years I was getting my NIH grants, and I was publishing. And it seemed like my work was staying in the journals and it wasn't going anywhere.
And so I felt frustrated by that, and the Clinical Trials Network is set up to translate research findings into clinical practice. It's a partnership between, at this point it's, 16 nodes. There are 16 universities, each affiliated with a number of drug treatment programs.
And so each of us at the university, we initiate studies, but we also conduct studies that are initiated in other nodes. And so for example in family therapy that I've developed, brief strategic family therapy with drug-using adolescents, we conducted a study in eight different cities around the states, around the United States and Puerto Rico, through the Clinical Trials Network.
And the studies are conducted in community treatment programs. So this is really taking the research out of the university and bringing it to the front line of practice.
And so these are community agencies, and we teach them how to conduct the trials. And they actually conduct the trials. We supervise, we monitor carefully, we train, but they conduct the trials. And of course we teach them the interventions that they're going to be testing, in this case, for example, they were testing our brief strategic family therapy as compared to whatever they did.
Because the real public health question is: Is this intervention that we've developed in a university-based setting better than what community agencies do? And different community agencies do different things, so we want the control to be, really, whatever eight different agencies were doing.
And so for me, it's been a huge learning experience because the collaboration with providers has taught me how much they know and how much they can contribute to making a research study successful in the real world.
So the way I would design a study today is very different than I would have ten years ago before I became involved with the Clinical Trials Network. So today we're conducting studies; we have sites in my node throughout all of Florida, in Puerto Rico, in North Carolina, and in Colorado.
And it's a wonderful thing to be able to see, not only our treatment, but many other treatments moving into the world of practice and making an impact, moving from the journal to the real world and making an impact.