In the last 10 years, the number of clinical trial applications in Slovenia ranged between 18 and 38 per year, which is relatively low compared to some European countries.
The purpose of the master's thesis was to evaluate the system of clinical trials in Slovenia.
We conducted two investigations. To investigate the aspect of the pharmaceutical companies we developed and used a questionnaire to determine what was the level of influence that a certain factor had on the decision of the company not to conduct clinical trials in Slovenia in greater extend or at all in the last 5 years. The influence of the factors that were identified from the literature was evaluated on 5-point Likert scale. The questionnaire was sent to 43 inovative and generic pharmaceutical companies of which 20 companies returned it. The purpose of the second investigation was to research the aspects of all key stakeholders of the system of clinical trials. For that we carried out a focus group where 10 participants represented key stakeholdes - representatives of clinical trial researchers, the regulatory bodies, the pharmaceutical companies and the contract research organizations. Quantitative data from the questionnaire was processed with MS Excel 2010 program while qualitative data from both investigations was processed with NVivo Pro 9. For the processing of the focus group data, we first created a transcript, followed by classification of the references from the questionnaire and the focus group into individual topics.
The results of the questionnaire showed that the administrative requirements (forms, contracts, signatures) by the clinical trial site institution and the motivation of the principal investigator had the greatest influence on the decision of the company not to conduct clinical trials in Slovenia, followed by factors related to the size of market, speed of approval of the clinical trial application by the Ethics Committee, number, qualifications, responsiveness and motivation of the study staff, knowledge, experience, skills, and concurrent workload of the principal investigator. Speed of approval of the clinical trial application by the Ethics Committee, lack of staff and research departments in the institutions, institutional contracting system and the poor knowledge of the guidelines of good clinical practice were recognised as important factors in the focus group. The participation of all key stakeholders in creating a more favorable environment for conducting clinical trials in Slovenia was highlighted as a possible solution.
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