GHID-KCCR leads community engagement in PARTNERS trial

Our role in Work Package 3 is to support the teams working directly with communities on the ground, so the people at the centre of this outbreak are informed and heard, not just enrolled.

Professor Jean-Jacques Muyembe, Director of INRB made a version of this point himself, noting that folding the trial into everyday clinical care gives patients access to promising treatments now, while building the evidence base for the next outbreak, something only possible where trust already exists between researchers and the people they serve.

They will not be running trial sites in the DRC; rather working alongside the teams who are on the ground there, offering strategy, tools and technical support as they work out how families hear about the trial, how consent gets explained in a way people actually understand, how rumours get answered before they harden into fact, and how what communities say back gets folded into how the trial is actually run.