What has happened to the Cancer Loyalty Card Study (CLOCS) since lockdown? An update from the research team

Submitted by admin on Mon, 06/08/2020 - 19:04

The COVID-19 pandemic affected the way we live, work, and engage with society. It has had a significant effect on how research is being carried out and also made us focus on how we can continue going forward. Here we discuss how CLOCS has been impacted by the pandemic and our future plans.

Image by Miroslav Kaclík from Pixabay

CLOCS is a multidisciplinary research project that aims to understand how ovarian cancer patients may have managed their symptoms before their cancer diagnosis using their past purchases from two UK-based high street retailers. The primary objective is to compare past purchases of women with ovarian cancer with purchases of women without ovarian cancer using what is called a case-control methodology. We aimed to achieve this with a hybrid approach that recruits newly diagnosed patients through their hospitals, and healthy women through our carefully designed secure website (www.clocspoject.org.uk).   We started developing the project in early 2019, and we recruited our first participant to the study in December 2019. While we were progressing rapidly to recruit participants to our study, we were all struck by the COVID-19 pandemic.

It has undeniably had a massive impact on our productivity with increases in caring responsibilities, challenges in transforming lives, and an on-going acknowledgement and acceptance for living with isolation and societal/personal grief. As a team, we acknowledged the psychological and physical challenges that the pandemic has brought to our lives. Since then, we are being kind to ourselves and working together setting ourselves achievable outcomes not just for research goals but also for our day-to-day lives.

The pandemic also had an impact on our data collection and participant recruitment. We immediately halted all patient recruitment at participating NHS research sites to reduce any unnecessary risks to the patients and the NHS nurses. We have also stopped social media presence for the study because the virus related research took precedence and importance to better understand the immediate impact to the larger society. As a team, we have also actively been involved supporting new research related to COVID-19 and cancer. We believe these new collaborations will bring new opportunities and challenges to help reduce delays in cancer diagnosis.  

These also meant that we have not been actively recruiting healthy participants to our study since March. There were a few reasons for this. Firstly, we did not have access to our secure database, which is only accessible physically at our secured access office based at the Imperial College London Campus in Hammersmith. Secondly, we wanted to reassess the impact of the pandemic on data collection and acceptability of this study and how people may change their shopping behaviours. Lastly, relaunching non-COVID-19 related research on social media has proven considerably challenging after being inundated with a vast amount of online surveys . How we can move forward and increase presence of other important research is a new challenge for all researchers.

Not without hope, we are adapting to the new world, finding solutions to recruit patients safely and improve data collection through our website. The importance of diagnosing ovarian cancer early has not changed and in fact, it is now more important than ever to understand how women who are experiencing vague symptoms will manage them before contacting a health care professional.

The CLOCS Research Team