With Thanksgiving being celebrated in the US last week, it got me thinking about business opening hours and accessibility. Obviously many shops remain open over holiday periods, so that people who work regular hours can visit them.

And I understand that it isn’t always convenient to have premises open outside of normal working hours – say up to 10pm, or on Sundays.

But it does raise the issue that if accessibility is one of the major problems in patient recruitment, we should really be trying to remove as many accessibility barriers as possible, in order to improve enrollment rates.

And I’m not simply directing this to the research sites. I think there’s an underlying principle that can be adopted – which possibly lies within the overall goal of decentralized trial methodology – such that maybe we can also think about making use of premises that are already open at times that may be more convenient?