Katie Peterson has started work with the Cambridge group.
The London group has appointed Nikil Patel, who will move from his current post in Birmingham to begin work at St George’s on April 18th.
2) ETHICS/GOVERNANCE
Katie is finalising the Cambridge-specific versions of the study documentation and permissions.
Confirmation of sponsorship and insurance have been requested from the SGUL research office. I can make a follow-up request if necessary.
A small amendment to the protocol has been approved, allowing posters advertising for control participants to be displayed across Trust and University premises. The amendment, a copy of the poster, and the new version of the protocol are now available in the project DropBox folder.
3) PARTICIPANT RECRUITMENT AND TESTING
Tabindah Khan and I have updated the item pre-norming set taking account of the comments that Karalyn kindly made on the initial materials. We aim to have acquired data from 20 controls over the coming month, allowing both official versions of the MLSE to be finalised, and patient and control participant testing to commence in June.
I have ordered two copies of the BDAE from ProEd Inc. Both will be shipped to SGUL for simplicity, but I will forward one of them to Cambridge as soon as they arrive, which will probably be next week.
4) DATABASE
SGUL will set up a REDCAP database in which all participating centres will be able to log and view MLSE scores and relevant clinical demographic details in anonymised format from all participants. This database solution will mean that all centres and PIs will be able to access the full set of accumulated project data without the need for individual requests and transfer on encrypted media. This facility will be essential once the database is large enough to be used for machine learning experiments.
Local Information Governance protocols will impose conditions on the way this valuable resource can be set up, and data sharing agreements will need to be signed off. I am meeting with our IG consultant (Shane Murphy) early next week.
I asked Katie to see if she could obtain (as agreed in the last teleconference) a copy of the data sharing agreement relating to Cambridge’s shared QCAT imaging database. SGUL will then use it as a basis for the agreement covering the REDCAP database.
5) PROJECT WEBSITE
Angela Ramcharan (PPI collaborator, and cc’ed into this and future updates) has drafted an outline of the MLSE website, which can be viewed at https://mlsexam.com.
Access to the pilot test materials has been made password protected (available on request, though the pdf files are available anyway in the DropBox folder and are simply acting as placeholders). I will be filling in the missing content over the coming days. Please send any design or content suggestions me and Angela. Administrator access will be set up for study researchers at all sites; please email me separately for the details.
There is an ‘updates’ page on the site, so I will try to use this as an additional medium for these project updates, though I may need some further coaching on this from Angela if I can’t figure it out.
6) DATE OF NEXT PROJECT MEETING
We are due a brief project meeting during or just before this year’s AAIC in London, which many of us will be attending. The Conference runs between the 16th (a Sunday) and 20th of July. Could all please briefly say if you are likely to be available for a project meeting in London during this window. I will offer some dates if we have representatives from all centres.
