What is a clinical trial? – Trial researchers

Because clinical trials have a very rigorous protocol that needs to be followed, that then flows on to the rest of the treating community. The only way to know ‘Is this medication actually better than our standard medication? Is it a safe medication? Are the side effects minimal or reasonable?’ is to do a clinical trial and compare it with our standard treatment. And if that trial shows, ‘Yes this treatment is better’, well then that will become available to everyone.

It's all about trying to actually do things better to improve health outcomes. Clinical trials allow you to make those little steps that lead eventually to that big advance. If you don't have the clinical trials, you can't tell which is the advance and which is going backwards. You know I think we have to get all health professionals to be engaged in the idea that clinical trials are a necessary component of all health care. So, at all levels of the health care system, you can make improvements. And that it's not just about drugs, it's about non-drugs, it's about the choices in management, the choices in organisation. All of those can be assessed through clinical trials.

I've always had an interest in knowledge and new knowledge, and that's what clinical trials provide us with. I think it's more curiosity. Passion gets you interested, but curiosity keeps you going. I want to know what I can recommend to my patients. And that's what clinical trials do. They give you very reliable information that you can objectively give to patients, or to the general community about whether something works or not? I think there's no doubt that Australia is seen as punching above its weight. We publish, relative to our population, probably twice as much as what you'd expect.

Yeah look, I think clinical trials are incredibly important in providing evidence for what we do every day in general practice. I think we rely on that quality of evidence, really, to guide us in what we do in terms of management across so many areas of medicine, things like use of medications in terms of heart disease, in stroke prevention, all of the decisions we make day to day in general practice are based on that sort of evidence. And where we don't have that evidence, it's much more challenging in clinical practice to know that you're doing the best thing you can for your patients.