MsBelinda Fazekas

Clinical trials
The development of clinical trials in palliative care in the Australian context has evolved after important foundation work is completed. I have contributed to this work as an author, investigator, and through the provision of meticulous record keeping, introduction of procedures to comply with regulations, and implementation of strategies and training. I now lead a team of project officers at ITCC who provide support and training for clinical trials conducted through IMPACCT at UTS.

RAPID Pharmacovigilance
I am a founding member of the research team who established the ongoing series of projects to collect real time data from an international group of contributors around the prescription of medications within the palliative care environment, using a standard approach to systematically collect prescribing, harm and benefit data. My role, as well as being an investigator, has been to support other teams to design the medication series, draft and finalise the data collection tools, and to guide the presentation of the data.

Recruitment
Recruitment to clinical trials in palliative care is a specific challenge, the success of the clinical trials conducted by PaCCSC hinges on successful recruitment. I have been responsible for the ongoing recruitment to the variety of trials underway at any given time, from designing the recruitment materials, through to study wide and site specific training, risk management and ongoing monitoring.

Economic Analysis
One of the important aims of the clinical trials conducted by PaCCSC/CST is to ensure that the study results, where ever possible also result in affordable access to the medication within the community. A novel aspect of the trials has been to include a systematic collection of health service utilization data to support any other economic endeavors with the study outputs. I have worked closely with investigators to ensure that robust data from a very sick and frail study population was collected, in order to inform on the economic impact of the study medication if made available in the community.