Health, Equity, and Research Talks (HEaRT) with Dr. Sonia Anand: Diversity in Clinical Trials – Nov. 19, 2024

Session Description

Clinical trials all too often fail to reflect the communities that stand to be most affected by the outcomes of that research. Like other broad efforts to build a fairer, more inclusive society, there is an ongoing movement toward health equity — the effort to assure every person in society has fair access to health care. Dr. Anand’s study discusses how reliance on traditional recruitment tools, such as posters in English in hospitals and clinics inviting people to volunteer, without considering the distribution of the disease of interest by ethnicity, leads to over-representation of white European participants, as there is no specific plan to engage high-risk communities. Even a small improvement in the percentage of racialized people who seek care and receive effective therapies can make a significant difference in the overall health of the population and the total cost of health care.