Understanding recruitment to a perioperative randomised controlled trial: protocol for a mixed-methods substudy nested within a feasibility trial of octreotide infusion during liver transplantation

Introduction Recruitment to perioperative randomised controlled trials is known to be challenging. Qualitative methods offer insight into barriers and enablers to participation. This is a substudy within a feasibility randomised controlled trial of octreotide infusion during liver transplantation at two National Health Service hospitals, which will evaluate patient and staff experiences of trial processes. By sharing formative understanding from these methods with the trials team we aim to improve staff-patient interactions and hence recruitment rates. Methods and analysis This prospective mixed-methods study will comprise two workstreams. First, after consent to the randomised controlled trial is sought, all patients will be invited to complete a questionnaire to explore their perceptions of the information given to them and motivating factors that influenced their decision to consent or not. Questionnaires will be analysed using descriptive statistics and framework analysis. If the recruitment:approach ratio drops below a predetermined ratio or if there are any specific recruitment concerns from the trials team, a second workstream involving mixed-methods fieldwork will be implemented. This will involve audiorecording of recruitment consultations and a follow-up semistructured interview to explore patients' perception of their decision-making regarding recruitment. Semistructured interviews will also be conducted with the recruitment team to establish their views about the trial, barriers to recruitment and ways to overcome them. Recruitment consultations will be analysed using Q-QAT methodology and interviews will be analysed using framework analysis. Findings from both workstreams will be formatively fed back to the trials team to enable iterative improvement to recruitment processes. Ethics and dissemination Approval has been granted by Greater Manchester West Research Ethics Committee (ref 20/NW/0071), the Health Research Authority and the local Research and Development offices. A manuscript detailing the summative findings will be submitted to peer-reviewed journals. Trial registration number NCT04941911

At-risk elementary school children with one year of classroom music instruction are better at keeping a beat

Temporal processing underlies both music and language skills. There is increasing evidence that rhythm abilities track with reading performance and that language disorders such as dyslexia are associated with poor rhythm abilities. However, little is known about how basic time-keeping skills can be shaped by musical training, particularly during critical literacy development years. This study was carried out in collaboration with Harmony Project, a non-profit organization providing free music education to children in the gang reduction zones of Los Angeles. Our findings reveal that elementary school children with just one year of classroom music instruction perform more accurately in a basic finger-tapping task than their untrained peers, providing important evidence that fundamental time-keeping skills may be strengthened by short-term music training. This sets the stage for further examination of how music programs may be used to support the development of basic skills underlying learning and literacy, particularly in at-risk populations which may benefit the most

Syncopation and the Score

The first and second authors were supported by an EPSRC DTA (www.epsrc.ac.uk) studentship

Regionalisation of trauma care in England

Aims We aimed to determine whether there is evidence of improved patient outcomes in Major Trauma Centres following the regionalisation of trauma care in England. Patients and Methods An observational study was undertaken using the Trauma Audit and Research Network (TARN), Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) and national death registrations. The outcome measures were indicators of the quality of trauma care, such as treatment by a senior doctor and clinical outcomes, such as mortality in hospital. Results and Conclusion A total of 20 181 major trauma cases were reported to TARN during the study period, which was 270 days before and after each hospital became a Major Trauma Centre. Following regionalisation of trauma services, all indicators of the quality of care improved, fewer patients required secondary transfer between hospitals and a greater proportion were discharged with a Glasgow Outcome Score of “good recovery”. In this early post-implementation analysis, there were a number of apparent process improvements (e.g. time to CT) but no differences in either crude or adjusted mortality. The overall number of deaths following trauma in England did not change following the national reconfiguration of trauma services. Evidence from other countries that have regionalised trauma services suggests that further benefits may become apparent after a period of maturing of the trauma system

Beat synchronization across the lifespan: intersection of development and musical experience

Rhythmic entrainment, or beat synchronization, provides an opportunity to understand how multiple systems operate together to integrate sensory-motor information. Also, synchronization is an essential component of musical performance that may be enhanced through musical training. Investigations of rhythmic entrainment have revealed a developmental trajectory across the lifespan, showing synchronization improves with age and musical experience. Here, we explore the development and maintenance of synchronization in childhood through older adulthood in a large cohort of participants (N = 145), and also ask how it may be altered by musical experience. We employed a uniform assessment of beat synchronization for all participants and compared performance developmentally and between individuals with and without musical experience. We show that the ability to consistently tap along to a beat improves with age into adulthood, yet in older adulthood tapping performance becomes more variable. Also, from childhood into young adulthood, individuals are able to tap increasingly close to the beat (i.e., asynchronies decline with age), however, this trend reverses from younger into older adulthood. There is a positive association between proportion of life spent playing music and tapping performance, which suggests a link between musical experience and auditory-motor integration. These results are broadly consistent with previous investigations into the development of beat synchronization across the lifespan, and thus complement existing studies and present new insights offered by a different, large cross-sectional sample

Quantifying Sources of Variability in Infancy Research Using the Infant-Directed-Speech Preference

Psychological scientists have become increasingly concerned with issues related to methodology and replicability, and infancy researchers in particular face specific challenges related to replicability: For example, high-powered studies are difficult to conduct, testing conditions vary across labs, and different labs have access to different infant populations. Addressing these concerns, we report on a large-scale, multisite study aimed at (a) assessing the overall replicability of a single theoretically important phenomenon and (b) examining methodological, cultural, and developmental moderators. We focus on infants’ preference for infant-directed speech (IDS) over adult-directed speech (ADS). Stimuli of mothers speaking to their infants and to an adult in North American English were created using seminaturalistic laboratory-based audio recordings. Infants’ relative preference for IDS and ADS was assessed across 67 laboratories in North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia using the three common methods for measuring infants’ discrimination (head-turn preference, central fixation, and eye tracking). The overall meta-analytic effect size (Cohen’s d) was 0.35, 95% confidence interval = [0.29, 0.42], which was reliably above zero but smaller than the meta-analytic mean computed from previous literature (0.67). The IDS preference was significantly stronger in older children, in those children for whom the stimuli matched their native language and dialect, and in data from labs using the head-turn preference procedure. Together, these findings replicate the IDS preference but suggest that its magnitude is modulated by development, native-language experience, and testing procedure

Development and Validation of the Computerised Adaptive Beat Alignment Test (CA-BAT)

Beat perception is increasingly being recognised as a fundamental musical ability. A number of psychometric instruments have been developed to assess this ability, but these tests do not take advantage of modern psychometric techniques, and rarely receive systematic validation. The present research addresses this gap in the literature by developing and validating a new test, the Computerised Adaptive Beat Alignment Test (CA-BAT), a variant of the Beat Alignment Test (BAT) that leverages recent advances in psychometric theory, including item response theory, adaptive testing, and automatic item generation. The test is constructed and validated in four empirical studies. The results support the reliability and validity of the CA-BAT for laboratory testing, but suggest that the test is not well-suited to online testing, owing to its reliance on fne perceptual discrimination