Good practice:

Trial Nation – one point entry to clinical trials in Denmark

Denmark wants to be strong in the competition for clinical trials - attract trials and investments, and can do so by taking advantage of the ease of access to the clinical environments, well-educated patients positive to participating in clinical trials, high quality of research, access to data and the well-functioning ecosystem that Denmark has. That is why the strong partnership - Trial Nation - was established in 2018.

Trial Nation services are open to public and private stakeholders and encompass :
- Identification of relevant clinical researchers and specialists
- Fast response time on feasibility requests (5 days)
- National recruitment strategy
- Access to registries
- Support of ongoing trials with focus on performance
- Established collaboration between sites. In some therapeutic areas clinical networks are coordinated and facilitated by an administrator and led by a health care professional (a medical lead) to ensure efficient clinical trials

Trial Nation represents a strong and mutually beneficial partnership between Ministry of Industry, Business and Financial Affairs and the Ministry of Health, the 5 Danish regions, Life science companies, Patient organisations, Danish Medical Societies and thus provides advantage for both public and private stakeholders. The Trial Nation Partnership has one Common Strategy that secures benefit and value for Patients, healthcare system, society and companies.

The 5 regions pays 6,4 mio. euro in a four year period (2020-2023). The state pays 2,4 mio. euro. in 2020-2021. Besides each region ads 1-2 full time equivalent worker a year.

Over the last 2-year period the number of clinical trials has increased by 2.6 times. Furthermore, Trial Nation has, as the first in Denmark, become an Associated Partner on a project of IMI (a EU public-private partnership funding health research and innovation.
Trial Nation builds on a Clinical Trial Office from 2012 in the Capital region which became a NEXT (a national Pharma partnership) in 2014 -2018.

Trial Nation provides a national set up and governance for facilitating clinical trials in Denmark for all therapeutic areas and phases with a unique network structure within a few selected therapeutic areas. Clinical trials are an example of public-private partnerships – and the strength and potential of common solutions to health care should be capitalised through these public private partnerships.
The potential for scale has been shown earlier, as the idea of creating one point of entry started in one of the five Danish Regions (on pharma coordination in few therapeutic areas), and later has expanded to all Danish Regions, more therapeutic areas network structure and also med tech.