Identify what benefits the trial might bring to your patient and community. How you will involve patients and consumers in the design of your trial from the outset?

• Test your ideas with your colleagues, friends, mentor, supervisor, manager.
• Seek support from people adept at systematic review, such as your health library services to explore how this trial will improve current services, but more importantly whether your question, your hypothesis has been answered before.

• How will answering this question improve health outcomes?
• Has your question been asked before in a clinical trial? Search clinical trial registries to make sure that your research question hasn’t already been asked by other researchers elsewhere:
• ANZCTR
• clinicaltrials.gov
• EU Clinical Trials Register
• European Union Drug Regulating Authorities Clinical Trials Database
• ISRCTN registry
• Has a systematic review or meta-analysis been done about your question/s?
• Does your question and clinical trial align with your organisation’s priorities?

Who can help?

• Each Local Health District (LHD) has a library and their staff can support you and your team by providing services during the development phase of your study.
• Library services may include:
  • Identify existing systematic reviews on a topic
  • Recommend appropriate databases
  • Review existing search strategies
  • Execute searches across multiple databases
  • Develop search strategies for each database
  • And through all these activities, helping to refine and develop a research question into a clear, focused hypothesis related to the topic of interest

Library contacts:

• Hunter New England Local Health District Library
• Central Coast Local Health District Library
• Mid North Coast Local Health District Library
• University of Newcastle Library Researcher Support
• University of New England Library Researcher Support
• RACGP John Murtagh Library