Facilitators and Barriers to Patient-Caregiver Dyadic Recruitment in Transplantation

Despite growing awareness of the dyadic role in transplant care and a mandate for patient-caregiver dyads for transplant listing, the integration of dyadic science into transplantation research is lacking. Recruiting transplant patient-caregiver dyads has unique challenges that need to be considered when designing and conducting dyadic studies in transplantation.

The aim of this study was to present (a) the barriers and facilitators to dyadic recruitment in a patient-caregiver transplant population that we encountered and (b) strategies developed to overcome these challenges.

We used the social marketing mix framework to guide this methodological report of patient-caregiver dyadic recruitment strategies employed during a post-lung-transplant psychometric study of 50 patient-caregiver dyads.

We identified several facilitators of dyadic recruitment in the lung transplant population, including (a) conducting a study of high relevance to both patients and caregivers, which helped facilitate maximum engagement of participants; (b) using remote recruitment and data collection strategies to improve accessibility to participation and minimize the amount of time or energy required to participate; (c) conducting patient and caregiver study visits independently from one another, which allowed for scheduling flexibility and helped improve participation among dyad members who do not live together; and (d) establishing clinical partnerships and having acquired clinical experience with the target population. We also identified barriers to dyadic recruitment that require careful planning in future studies, including (a) high healthcare utilization, which can delay the recruitment timeline; (b) recruiting patients and caregivers independently within relevant time frames; (c) gatekeeping, when the patient or the caregiver blocks researcher access to the other dyad member; (d) establishing contact with the participant via phone; and (e) limited study staffing that reduced recruitment and study visit scheduling flexibility.

To our knowledge, this is the first methodological report to present the barriers and facilitators to dyadic recruitment in a patient-caregiver transplant population. Our experience and lessons learned can be used to inform future research teams to successfully design and conduct much-needed dyadic research in organ transplantation.