When clinical trial sites, sponsors and tech vendors think about diversity and inclusion, we consider a variety of factors: age, race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, ability, and more. But we often forget to think about the importance of language access and clinical trial translations, especially for trials originating in the U.S. Get more news about clinical trials translation company,you can vist our website!
A study of U.S. clinical trials showed that there is a gap between protocols that include translations and the number of Americans who need them: This lack of translations could exclude more than 66 million people from trials–and that’s only when considering U.S. trials.
Removing English or local language proficiency requirements from clinical trials and ensuring translations are easily available will have tremendous benefits for patient recruitment and patient diversity. Keep reading to learn more about why translations are important and how clinical trial teams can use technology to make them widespread and accessible. Roughly 19% of U.S. clinical trials require that participants be proficient in English. Although the other 81% don’t require English proficiency, only 2.7% of them explicitly offer translations in their protocols.
This presents a major problem: even when non-English speakers aren’t deliberately excluded from trials, they are often inadvertently excluded. And this exclusion can also impact racial and ethnic diversity.
For example, 13.2% of the U.S. population speaks Spanish at home, but 97% of clinical trials don’t specify whether or not they can offer Spanish translations.
This same concern applies for patients who speak dozens of other languages, from Cantonese to Tagalog, Vietnamese, French, Korean, and Arabic. Even bilingual people can feel more comfortable when translations are available in their preferred language.
If the clinical trial industry doesn’t reach out to patients in their own languages, sites lose thousands of potential patients from diverse backgrounds, and those patients miss out on potentially life-saving treatments.International trials can have many positive effects. Pfizer used international trials to get the COVID-19 vaccine trials completed more quickly and with a more diverse patient population than trials typically have. Expanding trials to multiple countries also gives more patients access to cutting-edge medical treatments.
That said, international trials come with a risk of exploitation. If the sponsor creates documents in a language patients aren’t fluent in, it could create confusion over what a trial entails, leading to inaccurate data or, in a worst-case scenario, consent that isn’t truly informed.
Even with informed consent documents written in their preferred language, many patients don’t fully comprehend what they’re reading. 58.1% of participants show an intermediate understanding of informed consent documents, and 27.6% show a low understanding.
