Project 466180

Children require medicines and other non-drug therapies for many reasons, however, most treatments have never been tested in children or approved for use in their age group. Clinical trials answer important questions about which treatments work best under which conditions. Without clinical trials, paediatricians are often left to dose children based on data that has come from adults or other populations. Clinical trials take time, money and expertise to answer meaningful questions and require highly-qualified personnel in clinical trials. The IMPACT Team will provide open-access (free) education on clinical trial design, operations and communication in child health clinical trials created and delivered by experts from across Canada. This will be hosted online and available to the public. One-year immersive fellowships will be available for learners to get more advanced training and develop their own protocol with expert mentors from academia and outside academia including youth. Finally we will host an annual 3.5 day workshop to bring researchers together from across different cities, research centres, and areas of child health. Our extensive network of child health researchers, health care providers, youth and parents will provide diverse training available to all with hands-on opportunities in government, contract research organizations and advocacy. We will include a robust knowledge mobilization strategy and diverse hand-on, in-person learning experiences in government and health policy to expose trainees to broad career opportunities. We will tailor our approaches to enhance training opportunities for equity-seeking groups with the goal of increasing diversity of clinical trial research teams in child health. We will participate in the Pan-Canadian Trials Consortium as appropriate.