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Community at time protest for poor services by their municipalities and sometime this protest course some disorder in normal day to day running of different people. participant will be struggling to get transport to come to the side and at times it would be difficult for transport to reach people. when thing i like these it is very difficult for any community. Study visits are affected and recruitment of new participants is also affected.
the other challenge is that who do you engage? the community or the municipality? you just have to wait for the protest to stop and for the period your work is affected.
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Replies
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When community members protest against poor or lack of services by their local authorities, causing disruption of traffic, attendance of research scheduled events may be disrupted. This type of unanticipated events are difficult to predict and mitigation planned. sometimes it may require the site to plan for additional provision of funds for transport reimbursement since it may force study participant to use longer routes to the site, or participants may need to be rescheduled.
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Community protest has at one point affected our site when there was a crack down by the Government to implement traffic safety rules. The Government was trying to reinforce use of safety belts. This affected the turn up of the study participants for their protocol visits and recruitment of new ones.Majority of the vehicles had not complied with law. The few vehicles that had complied hiked the bus fare of which majority of the participants could not afford. The participants had to be rescheduled depending on their protocol window period.
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Community service protest rarely occurs in our site, for instance in the past 14 years I have been living in this area it occured once like 4 or 5 years ago, and actually study visits were affected because the participants were unable to come at the clinic as all roads were blocked. Soon after knowing about this event we phoned all participants who were supposed to come on that day and the next day, we gave them other appointments depending on their window periods and it worked just well. and as for solving the problem actually the research site could not do anything because it was the matter of the Municipality and police to release the chairperson of people who were doing business in the one of the big markets in town due to reluctance in paying certain taxes. So the site only had to wait for the responsible authorities to work out the matter
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Your points also remind me that trials do not occur in isolation– whether a trial succeeds or not can depend on political, social, cultural and other contextual factors. Keep these important issues in mind and incorporate them into your GPP planning— as you start reflecting more about how stakeholders can help you with processes like problem-solving, communication, messaging and contingency plans!
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In our communities we have not yet encountered this kind of protests that affect study participants in relation to recruitment and retention. But i agree with my colleagues that we need a management plan to mitigate such unforeseen cases. Back in our communities we were affected with floods and the roads were cut off. Participants were resettled in different areas by the government, but as a site we redesigned our strategies to ensure participant safety by closing working government officials.
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We all know that research is actually the process of taking a path that is unknown and unforeseen so we must prepare our mind for rejection and accept rejection as part of the process. When we work with this mind set everything became easy to handle because we make everything “foreseeable” and anticipate worst scenarios. We need to design a conflict mitigation plan. For instance, in an event of strike what immediate actions should the participant take? Who should participants call, how should they protect themselves etc, What actions should the staff take, security doors must be lock at all times, who should they call, who should be reported to, what changes need to be instituted in recruitment/follow up, who should draft press briefing materials, who should address the media etc. It is the confusion associated with crisis management that have huge negative impact on trials.
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I totally agree with you colleagues. These are some of the unforeseen issues that can arise in any project. It is always important top be prepared to face such unplanned events that may affect your research. If in the initial design of the research you had taken into account negative unforeseen events, then you will have a back up plan to address such issues. Life is not always straight forward and such obstacles are expected in any normal life of a persons project or research.
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They do give the information upfront but in most cases you find that, we get informed few days before the protest and by then we already have participants booked according to their windows but it does help a lot to be informed on time. Well some communities do continue with protest even after the municipality has come up with the solutions as long as they are not satisfied and that is against the law but they do it.
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Community service protest is our main problem in the community, few weeks ago we had a protest that lasted about 2 weeks. roads were closed even if you had your own transport to accommodate participants it was difficult to reach their households. In situations like this the main concern is participants we need to think about their safety first as much as we need them to attend their visits. we do engage with stakeholders because they inform us when the protest is going to take place and how long is it going to take. the Mayor usually meets with the community and come up with the solution and how to meet the community half way.
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This is an interesting scenario. If you are aware there will be protests or, for example, an annual ‘strike season’ in your setting, can you include this in your scenario planning with team members before the trial begin–in order to analyze and prioritize the issue a but more? For example, do the protests threaten the research in any other way, besides pushing timelines?Are there safety concerns for participants, for example? Many events like these can be managed with good planning or even turned into opportunity. In one my trial settings, we actually used community protests as an opportunity to engage our media outlet!
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