Improving Informed Consent for Novel Vaccine Research in a Pediatric Hospital Setting Using a Blended Research-Design Approach

• Main Authors: Sally M. Jackson, Margherita Daverio, Silvia Lorenzo Perez, Francesco Gesualdo, Alberto E. Tozzi
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Frontiers Media S.A. 2021-01-01
• Series: Frontiers in Pediatrics
• Subjects: informed consent; ethics; mixed-methods; clinical research; natural language processing (nlp); design thinking (DT)
• Online Access: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fped.2020.520803/full

It is necessary to conduct Clinical Trials in children, including for novel vaccines. Children cannot legally provide valid consent, but can assent to research participation. Informed consent and assent communications are frequently criticized for their lack of comprehensibility and often, researchers do not involve patients in informed consent design. We tested a blended research-design approach to co-design multimedia informed consent prototypes for experimental vaccine studies targeted at the pediatric population. We report details on the methodology utilized, and the insights, ideas, and prototype solutions we generated using social media data analysis, a survey, and workshops. A survey of clinical trial researchers indicated that while the most did not use technology for informed consent, they considered its utilization favorable. Social media analysis enabled researchers to quickly understand where community perspectives were concordant and discordant and build their understanding of the types of topics that they may want to focus on during the design workshops. Participatory design workshops for children and their families reaped insights, ideas, and prototypes for a range of tools including apps and websites. Participants felt that the prototypes were better able to communicate necessary content than the original text document format. We propose using a participatory, mixed-methods approach to design informed consent so that it is better adapted to patients' needs. Such an approach would be helpful in better addressing the needs of different segments of the populations involved in clinical trials. Further evidence should be gained about the impact of this strategy in improving recruitment, decreasing withdrawals and litigations, and improving patient satisfaction during clinical trials.