Recruitment for a hospital-based pragmatic clinical trial using volunteer nurses and students.

Background/aims:Recruitment of subjects is critical to the success of any clinical trial, but achieving this goal can be a challenging endeavor. Volunteer nurse and student enrollers are potentially an important source of recruiters for hospital-based trials; however, little is known of either the efficacy or cost of these types of enrollers. We assessed volunteer clinical nurses and health science students in their rates of enrolling family members in a hospital-based, pragmatic clinical trial of cardiopulmonary resuscitation education, and their ability to achieve target recruitment goals. We hypothesized that students would have a higher enrollment rate and are more cost-effective compared to nurses.Methods:Volunteer nurses and student enrollers were recruited from eight institutions. Participating nurses were primarily bedside nurses or nurse educators while students were pre-medical, pre-nursing, and pre-health students at local universities. We recorded the frequency of enrollees recruited into the ...