Helen MacDonald

But I guess they also have concerns in a usual care setting about their privacy and their confidentiality.

So maybe this would be a useful story to tell that one of the reasons we can't do this at the moment is because we have all these

The other interesting thing that's come out is we know that routine clinical care for patients has been quite disruptive.

But what about care for patients who are currently involved in ongoing research, particularly trials?

Because we've heard some reports that their experience has been disrupted and what are the implications for patients?

And I spoke to Henry Stowcroft earlier today, who's one of the BMJ's patient editors.

He also works for Cancer Research UK and I caught up with him to give us a quick update.

It was sad to hear from Henry about the trial disruption that might be facing particularly cancer patients.

But on the PPI front now, as an optimist, I was quite hopeful to hear Henry say that it's not too late and patients and clinicians will hopefully find ways to discover each other and involve each other in their work.

So in other words, Carl, you're saying you're debating whether if you're a researcher and you have this evidence, do you put your effort into helping the media to understand it because they are the channel of dissemination?

Or to some extent, do you look to other channels that just speak directly to patients or the public or whoever you think is your end user, for want of a better word?

The more titles you get, the more promotions you get.

Do you think it's a researcher's job, though, Carl, or do you think it's really showing that...

there's a role for communication or communicators in this, whether that's a journal's role, whether that's the media's role or some kind of person that doesn't exist.

But isn't it a bit hard on researchers to say the type of person who is maybe a wonderful researcher, very good at methods and reporting in a particular style and language, maybe they're just not the right person to be doing that second part, which is saying, I'm going to tell you what,

this means, which is more perhaps about interpretation or laying it out in user-friendly formats.

Isn't it just asking researchers to be able to be illustrators, communicators, setting too high a bar?

And goodbye from me.

Hi, Duncan.

That's really interesting you mentioned that, Carl, because one of the first things I wanted to come to in the podcast this week was around how can we better support people with non-COVID related problems to come forward when they need to.