Our aim is to define current strategies for patient recruitment and examine infrastructure succeeding retention and whether these winning strategies can be applied uniformly to other clinical sites.

 Achieving patient recruitment goals is one of the most challenging obstacles to overcome for any randomized clinical study to be successful. This is particularly true in studies with patients that are enrolled during unscheduled hospital admissions.

The survey presented to the stroke sites identified barriers and methods utilized for patient recruitment. The results are from 10 of the 20 sites that responded.

1. 57% of the sites used presentations to the neurology clinical staff as the most common promotional method followed by local advertisements and symposiums.

2. 50% of the sites reported their institution provides funding to support the salaries of recruitment staff activities.

3. 80% of the sites reported they did not have full time recruiter.

4. 80% of the sites did not include IRB approved incentives in their recruitment plan.

 The preliminary results provide a picture of the activity involved in patient recruitment and retention at clinical research sites specializing in acute stroke trials. Our data indicate that the majority of the sites examined had common promotional methods and reported not to utilize IRB approved incentives for patient recruitment. A majority of the sites did not employ a full-time recruiter to identify patients for the study but instead relied on their clinical stroke team. Our poster presentation will include results from additional sites responding to our survey.