Table 3.

Responses to questions surveying pretrial and recruitment barriers in clinical deprescribing trials

Question theme	Number of responses (%)
Major barriers to ethical approval
Recruitment of vulnerable participants	47 (18.9)
Recruitment of participants who are unable to provide verbal or written consent (ie, access to carer issues)	46 (18.5)
Seeking approval for ethics from multiple stakeholders, for example, nursing home, nursing staff, and patient	42 (16.9)
Ethics committee inexperience with reviewing protocols for deprescribing trials	41 (16.5)
Potential for adverse drug withdrawal events associated with deprescribing medications	35 (14.1)
Limited evidence of benefit of deprescribing medications	27 (10.8)
Other	11 (4.4)
Major barriers to national regulatory authority approval
Establishing and demonstrating safe implementation of a multidisciplinary deprescribing intervention	54 (41.5)
Demonstrating good clinical practice according to national directives	26 (20.0)
Demonstrating quality assurance systems	21 (16.2)
Establishing and demonstrating safe manufacturing of placebo and study drug(s)	12 (9.2)
Do not know/did not understand question/not applicable	10 (7.7)
Passing audits and inspections	2 (1.5)
Other	5 (3.8)
Major recruitment barriers
Beliefs and opinions of health professionals caring for their patients influencing the decision to deprescribe treatments	57 (31.0)
Recruitment of participants who are unable to consent during the screening process due to external factors—for example, carer not present, too ill	51 (27.7)
Patient and/or carer apprehension	37 (20.1)
Co‐ordination of study organization between researcher, recruiter and patient and/or carer, and their treating health professionals	30 (16.3)
Other	9 (4.9)

Participants could select more than one option; N = 96.