The Ophthalmology Clinical Trials Network is the UK trainee led clinical trials network for Ophthalmology. This is the website of the Pan-London regional network.

Why a trainee network?

Trainees often work on local audits or research projects in our respective units. These typically involve small patient numbers and have very limited clinical impact. Short rotations and changes to placements often conspire to leave projects half-finished.

The OCTN aims to change this by supporting networking and collaboration between trainees and individual Ophthalmology units. By harnessing the support of more experienced researchers and the resources of many trainees, we aim to produce large, well-designed studies that change clinical practice.

This model of trainee research collaboratives in other surgical specialties and anaesthesia has been extremely successful. Combining prospective data from multiple centres has resulted in excellent studies published in high impact journals. For example, the West Midlands Research Collaborative published their first study (ROSSINI) in the BMJ. Every contributor (all 458) received recognition as a citable collaborator on PubMed.