The cost of community research—recruiting community-dwelling participants to a feasibility primary care cluster randomised controlled trial

BACKGROUND: To support a robust evidence base for the organisation and provision of community-delivered health services for older people, clinical trials need to be designed to account for community-based participant recruitment. There is currently little reported information available on the time and cost of recruiting community-dwelling older people, which makes the completion of cost attribution documentation problematic when applying for research funding. MAIN BODY: We aimed to establish the amount of researcher time it takes to recruit community-dwelling older people to a feasibility primary care cluster randomised controlled trial, including collecting baseline data. The trial was part of a programme of work investigating an intervention to improve the quality of life for older people with frailty. Two researchers conducting home visits to recruit and collect baseline data from participants recorded the time spent on travelling to and from the visit, at the visit itself and any associated administration. The median total researcher activity time per visit was 148 min. We discuss the various elements of recruitment and data collection activity and the factors that impacted the length of time taken, including location, individuals’ capacity and cognition, hearing and visual impairment and the desire for social contact. CONCLUSION: Studies cannot reach their recruitment targets if they are unrealistically planned and resourced. We recommend that trials recruiting older people in the community allocate two and a half hours of researcher time per person, on average, for consent, baseline data collection, travel and administration. We acknowledge that a variety of different factors will mean that researcher activity will vary between different community-based trials. Our findings give a good starting point for timing calculations, and evidence on which to base the justification of research activity costings. TRIAL REGISTRATION: Personalised care planning for older people with frailty ISRCTN12363970. 08/11/2018.