eParental Insights

Background: It is well known that parents experience a great amount of stress when their baby is admitted to NICU. Including parent-reported experiences, especially of under-represented groups, in clinical trials is important, improving engagement, involvement, participation, and impact. Still, these experiences are rarely captured as this typically adds substantially to the burden and costs of clinical trials. We will address this challenge by developing a fully automated, cost-effective, user-friendly digital approach to capture parent-reported experiences.  

Aims: We wish to test the feasibility and acceptability of an approach to capture parent reported experiences, systematically, efficiently, and at low cost. We will use state-of-the art electronic technologies to provide an electronic version of a standardised parental stressor scale and incorporate the results into a mature well-established national asset, the National Neonatal Research Database (NNRD), so that they are available for clinical and authorised secondary purposes.  

The study: We are piloting a new approach involving electronic capture of parent reported experiences. This study is funded by Imperial's Biomedical Research Centre and led by the Neonatal Data Analysis Unit, supported by the Imperial Clinical Trials Unit.

Investigators

• Dr Annemarie Lodder, Parent, Patient and Public Involvement and Engagement Research Fellow, Imperial College London
• Professor Neena Modi, Professor of Neonatal Medicine, Imperial College London 
• Dr James Webbe, Clinical Lecturer, Imperial College London
• Dr Ricardo Ribas, Programme Manager, Imperial College London 
• Mr Francesco Lala, Head of Clinical Data Systems, Imperial Clinical Trials Unit 
• Dr Daphne Babalis, Director of Operations, Imperial Clinical Trials Unit
• Ms Jo Timothy, Parent Representative
• Dr Victoria Cornelius, Head of Statistics, Imperial College London

Clinical Support

• Dr Elizabeth Lek, Consultant Neonatologist, Hillingdon Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
• Dr Sunit Godambe, Consultant Neonatologist, Imperial NHS Trust (Queen Charlotte’s and Chelsea Hospital and St Mary’s Hospital)
• Dr Edit Fukari-Irvine, Consultant Neonatologist, Northwick Park Hospital
• Dr Elizabeth Eyre, Consultant Neonatologist, West Middlesex Hospital
• Dr Enitan Ogundipe, Consultant Neonatologists, Chelsea and Westminster NHS Foundation Trust