Table 1

Interviewee quotes for motivations for engagement in trainee collaborative research and challenges to that engagement

ThemeParticipant quotes
Benefits of trainee collaborative researchHigher quality trials and greater impact
‘Hopefully, the attitude’s changing from you can be a one-man band in your hospital and perform a small study that may not … have all that much influence … to do things in larger networks and nationally having a greater power … greater significance, better for patients’. (P06, trainee, interview)
Ability to deliver trials
‘We’re able to turn over larger multi-centre studies quite quickly … that study … recruited 900 patients in a 12-week period over a national recruitment drive of about 50 sites’. (P02, trainee, interview)
‘When we were trying to roll the study out, we were conscious that we needed the help of the registrars [trainees] all over [region] and the [collaborative] was a great forum to access that’. (P29, research nurse, interview)
‘Trainees are pretty important in the way we deliver the trials. Nearly all of our patients are recruited in a very quick turnaround. A lot of it is out of hours … and the only people there are the surgical team [trainees] … a patient that comes in that’s eligible and they will recruit them and randomise them … we really rely on the registrars [trainees] … You’d have quite substantial, well double the amount of staff that we do now’. (P11, consultant, interview)
Mutually beneficial relationship
‘I don’t like the word using. I would say working with the trainees, and that’s really important. It’s a collaboration. They’re not doing us a job. We are working with them and they’re working with us, so I see it as them working with us, but equally our role with them is an apprenticeship in trials, and that’s what they gain as well as a certificate and all the rest of it. They are actually gaining this exposure to working with an expert team, which is really valuable and unique, so that’s what I’d like to think’. (P08, consultant, interview)
Investment in future research
‘Some of them [trainees] become research-active consultants and take their role to champion research in their unit … actually that’s very valuable … the whole point of collaborative research is that we want to prepare trainees to be research active clinicians’. (P07, trainee, interview)
‘They [TRCs] also give the next generation of academic’s real experience of the difficulties and politics involved in running research projects’. (P16, trainee, survey)
Trainee motivations to engage with collaborative researchPersonal motivations
‘I think the initial carrot is always going to be the line on the CV that they become a named author, they get a publication or a presentation out of it and I think that is definitely what brings them into the room’. (P05, trainee, interview)
Interest in research
‘There was … that [training requirement] when I first got involved … didn’t really know much about research. As I got involved, I actually found it enjoyable’. (P02, trainee, interview)
Altruistic motivations
‘Best opportunity as a trainee to contribute to meaningful research that has the potential to improve patient care’. (P5, trainee, survey)
Gaining knowledge and skills
‘They [trainees] understand that participation will develop skills for them not just understanding how to do research, but … transferable skills—communications skills, how you talk to patients, colleagues … leadership skills, and so on’. (P07, trainee, interview)
Challenges in engagement with trainee collaborative researchAwareness and opportunity
‘Never been informed of the existence of a trainee research collaborative’. (P29, trainee, survey)
Time restraints
‘The time is a big constraint … there’s so many other demands on your time as a surgical junior. It’s the wards want you, theatre … nurses, clinic … assessments as part of your training … to leave time for research … it all gets a bit squeezed … shifted to the bottom of the pile’. (P06, trainee, interview)
Perceptions of poor quality
‘Research should be led by people with the sufficient time and training to do so and who are paid from this role’. (P65, trainee, survey)
‘Some people … would say that it’s a risk in terms of poor quality data … if you involve a hundred people at a site rather than three, there’s an understandable concern that you will have a lower quality trial’. (P08, consultant, interview)
Lack of recognition and transparency in roles
‘At the end of the day really there are one or two people who put a lot of time and effort in who are actually going to benefit from this … there can be some cynicism that although it states collaborative, the person whose name is at the front or at the back of the authorship is really the one that you’re doing it for’. (P24, trainee, interview)
Confidence and integration
‘When you have a group of people who are well established and you’re the new person coming in … sometimes it’s hard to break into the ranks of that’. (P23, trainee, interview)
Trainee movement
‘You can look at it both sides of the coin I think, it can be a difficulty because yes trainees will find it difficult to be a CI [chief investigator] because we’re not registered in a permanent kind of role at a hospital, but it really allows trainees to move round trusts. Also to try and spread the word if you would to one site to another and get other sites involved where they might have been involved in a study at one site setting that up and then they move on to the other site and so that site then gets set up etc and they can move round each time’. (P02, trainee, interview)
‘I think as the CI [chief investigator] of a project you need to be wary of when the rotation dates are, because you don’t want to plan to collect data just before or just after someone’s moved a rotation. So, I think you have to be mindful of when you plan your data collection points’. (P05, trainee, interview)
‘Depending on which consultant you’re working with at that time is probably going to negate whether you act on that research or not but because they move around fairly quickly then most of them get a chance to do so at some point’. (P29, research nurse, interview)