The European Commission has granted the i-CONSENT project with a 1-year extension to continue improving informed consent processes.
The extension responds to a late modification to widen the project activities and the mitigation of the impact of COVID-19.
i-CONSENT will dedicate this additional year to validate the guidelines in a real clinical trial coordinated by FISABIO on influenza vaccine in children (Vigira; EUDRA 2019-001186-33). Alongside, the guidelines will go through an additional round of revision by experts in different field, following the RAND/UCLA Appropriateness Method.
The current COVID-19 circumstances have also played their part in this extension. The validation of the materials included in the i-CONSENT informed consent proposal, and elaborated for adults, children and pregnant women, has been postponed due to impossibility of carrying out the interviews with the target groups. This activity will be retaken once the COVID-19 situation allows it.
To contribute to the COVID-19 emergency situation, i-CONSENT project is developing a series of tools with strategies for healthcare professionals to improve health information and better communicate with patients and citizens, in general. Initially, the Project was designed to make informed consent in clinical research more comprehensible to the participant. However, COVID-19 pandemic has opened a new window that allows extrapolating these efforts to make health information, whose circulation has intensified fiercely during the past month, more understandable to society in general. Find the tools here:
- i-CONSENT COVID-19 glossary of terms
- Communicating for society: tool for health professionals
- How to tailor the health information to the audience: Strategies and tools to know societies’ concerns and address them in our health messaging, especially in the current COVID-19 emergency
Also, the project team is working on some additional recommendations to be added to the project guidelines dealing with informed consent in health emergency situations like the one presented by COVID-19.
Congratulations to all the team! Lets keep up with the work.