I do not consider recruitment as the as the core theme and objective of stakeholder engagement but I can understand where most of us are coming from; In most sites or at least in our site community engagement has always been not been given the priority it deserves. What usually happens is that when a protocol is being developed scientists who have the say in protocol management will be preoccupied with the science and budgets. By the time version 1.0 of the protocol is released priority becomes the regulatory review process. The next thing will be to ask the community engagement team to develop a recruitment SOP and the pressure move to the community and get potential study participants for screening. It is therefore understandable why people confuse the two. This training has described Community Engagement as the process of identifying, educating and involving critical stakeholders ( which includes potential study participants) before, during and after the trial.
