Optimising participant recruitment and retention in studies investigating pregnancy-related pelvic girdle pain

Background

Recruitment and retention in clinical trials in women's health is known to be challenging. Recommendations for improvement include consideration of study burden, with suggestions of decentralisation and electronic data capture to mitigate this [1, 2]. Failure to recruit was recently demonstrated in two feasibility trials of orthoses specifically for women with pregnancy-related pelvic girdle pain[3,4], one of which failed to recruit even though delivery was largely remote (theoretically reducing burden and limiting conflicts due to work, childcare, and privacy) and despite employing patient and public involvement to inform the study design, and utilising several recruitment strategies including targeted social media as well as other PPIE/stakeholder recommendations.