Dr Clare Relton

Dr Clare Relton

Dr Clare Relton

(International Advisors)

Dr Clare Relton Senior Lecturer in Clinical and Public Health Trials at Queen Mary University of London. Clare is interested in trialling any intervention which might bring practical health benefits – particularly those which help support healthy lifestyles, and empower people and the communities they live in to support their own health needs.

About Dr Clare Relton

Clare specialises in the efficient and practical design of randomised controlled trials that generate real world evidence. She leads and supports the development of new trials with chief investigators, from conception to completion. Her methodological interests focus on innovative recruitment and informed consent processes, particularly those that help health providers continually learn from the care they deliver, i.e. ‘learning health systems’. Clare supervises PhD students and teaches courses on how to apply and develop efficient, practical approaches to trial design. She enjoys bringing together clinicians, researchers, triallists, regulators, and ethicists to share experiences and learning.

Clare is currently a Senior Lecturer in Clinical Trials at the Centre for Primary Care and Public Health at QMUL and an honorary Senior Research Fellow at ScHARR (University of Sheffield). She has a background in Philosophy and Complementary and Alternative Medicine. With the support of a Department of Health Fellowship she completed her MSc (Health Services Research), and PhD (Pragmatic Trial Design) in 2009. This led to the publication of an innovative pragmatic trial design which is now known as Trials within Cohorts (TwiCs). Studies using the TwiCs design utilise cohorts (i.e. observational studies, routine health data sources) to recruit and/or collect outcome data for randomised controlled trials. Clare was part of the international team who developed CONSORT-ROUTINE - the new extension to the 2010 Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials (CONSORT) Statements for RCTs using cohorts and/or routinely collected data.

In addition to her methodological research Clare also designs and leads intervention trials in public health nutrition and integrative medicine including homeopathic medicine. She led the Yorkshire Health Study (2010-2019) – a large regional population based observational study and multiple trials facility, and the NOSH Project (Vouchers for Breastfeeding) cluster randomised controlled trial (2012-2017). Her most recent project, FRESH Street (2017-2019), developed and feasibility tested a place-based intervention which offered households weekly vouchers for locally supplied (non-supermarket) fresh fruit and vegetables in areas with poor diet and health. The Fresh Street approach is now being tested in a variety of deprived areas in the north and south of England www.freshstreet.uk