查看文章

Recruitment and retention of participants are both critical for the success of trials, yet both remain significant problems. The use of incentives to target participants and trial staff has been proposed as one solution. The effects of incentives are complex and depend upon how they are designed, but these complexities are often overlooked. In this paper, we used a scoping review to ‘map’ the literature, with two aims: to develop a checklist on the design and use of incentives to support recruitment and retention in trials; and to identify key research topics for the future.

The scoping review drew on the existing economic theory of incentives and a structured review of the literature on the use of incentives in three healthcare settings: trials, pay for performance, and health behaviour change. We identified the design issues that need to be …