Just before Christmas the report by Ingrid Pettersson (IP) on national coordination of clinical studies, Starkare Tillsammans [Stronger Together] was published. The report recommends the setting up of a national board with six regional nodes with the task of facilitating clinical research in Sweden. IP proposes that the regional nodes should assist by:

• Offering companies and academic researchers help in quickly identifying patients and investigators for participation in specific studies
• Offering basic advice in connection with clinical studies, such as study protocols, legal advice, statistics etc
• Acting as a contact point for quality register centres, regional biobanks, regional cancer centres and innovation gateways
• Being a contact point for research nurses
• Arranging contacts with statisticians, epidemiologists ad health economists
• Writing applications to the Medical Products Agency, radiological protection committee, ethical review board, drawing up agreements with biobanks etc.
• Carrying out monitoring, training in testing of medical products, GCP monitoring etc.
• Giving specific advice for medicotechnical 
• Carrying on specially adapted external environment monitoring
• Entering  into agreements on behalf of the principal

It is gratifying to be able to state that Gothia Forum can already offer these services today. The next step is to create a national coordination of the different regional nodes. Gothia Forum intends to invite representatives of the other medical service regions to an initial discussion of how we can best cooperate in this matter, which is so important to the nation.

Towards the end of last year and in the early part of this year Gothia Forum has recruited a number of new employees to give a further boost to our competence and thereby strengthen the organization. We are therefore just now in a phase of internal development work intended to establish a management system that supports Gothia Forum’s continued development and establishment. We are doing this in order to ensure the delivery of our services and also to give the possibility of raising the scale of our activities. This work is expected to be completed in the summer of 2014.

While this is going on, normal operations continue with undiminished vigour. We are involved in a number of joint projects with the Life Science Industry in the form of register studies and health economic analyses and are assisting with project management in a number of investigator-initiated studies. In addition we are involved in the megaproject SCAPIS, about which you can read more in this news letter.

The team at Gothia Forum and I look forward to meeting in new joint projects in 2014.

Roger Juhlin, Acting Director, Gothia Forum