How can behavioural science help us design better trials?

[...]failure to recognise the behavioural influences (and change them where appropriate) could contribute to the failure of the trial. [...]insofar as behaviours are at the heart of clinical trial delivery, then behavioural science—the study of behaviour and behaviour change—can provide critical, replicable, and generalisable insights for the clinical trials community. Behavioural science as applied to health seeks to use the theories, methods, and knowledge from these disciplines to design more effective health care interventions. The application of behavioural science to complex problems in health care has clearly been effective in changing both patient (e.g., smoking cessation) and health care professional behaviour (e.g., following recommendations for acute stroke care) as well as improving patient outcomes on both the short and long terms [5, 6]. A study by Cuthbertson and colleagues sought to identify why the ICU community had not widely adopted the use of selective decontamination (SDD) of the digestive tract in ICU patients given the substantial evidence supporting the effectiveness of SDD from 12 meta-analyses of 36 RCTs [7].