The EST-project turns 1-year old!

This month the EST-project turned 1-year old and what a year it’s been! Birthdays are always a time for reflection so we thought we’d use our first birthday to reflect on our key achievements and set some goals for the year ahead! 

The first year of the EST-project has involved lots and lots of planning but we have also managed to achieve some big successes along the way as well! The biggest highlights from the past 12 months have been receiving approvals from Cochrane and Prospero to conduct systematic reviews about stuttering interventions! You can read more about each of these reviews in previous posts on our blog here and here. Since receiving those approvals we have been learning how to use new software programs and digital tools, developing the protocol for the Cochrane review and have recently started our literature search for the Prospero review! 

We have also spent a lot of time developing ways to communicate with you! We launched our blog so that we can provide you with regular updates on the EST-project. We have also developed a website for the project in Norwegian and English which you will find here. Finally, we have been working closely with a creative designer to develop an animation that will be used to explain our study to families, researchers and clinicians around the world and to recruit families to our study! The animation is almost ready and will be released over the next few weeks. We can’t wait to share it with all of you!

The final highlight we wanted to share with you is starting to prepare for our randomized controlled trial (RCT). The RCT will commence early in 2019 so we have been having extensive discussions at team meetings, reviewing previous RCT methodologies and planning all of the components that are required for a project of this size to be successful!  

As you can see it has been a huge year for us. We wouldn’t have been able to achieve any of this as quickly as we have without the expertise and contributions from members of our ever-expanding team! Over the past 12 months, our team has expanded from 3 original investigators to a team of 9 researchers including a PhD student and a postdoctoral student! And then of course we have also established our advisory committee and working relationships with key stakeholders around Norway. 

The next 12 months is shaping up to be just as busy if not busier than our first year was! In just 2 weeks, our team will be meeting in Denmark for a writing retreat to work intensively on the Cochrane and Prospero reviews and continuing planning the RCT in detail. One of our chief investigators, Elaina Kefalianos, will be travelling to Norway (all the way from Australia!) to spend 3 months with the rest of the team at the University of Oslo from August to November working on the EST-project. We are really looking forward to spending this time with her and having discussions face to face again!

In January 2019, we will start recruiting participants for the RCT and start the trial! Before then, we have a lot of work to do planning the recruitment process, choosing the treatments that we are going to use in the RCT, and making sure that our speech language pathologists are comprehensively trained in the treatments we are going to be using.

The first year of the EST-project has been incredibly busy but also a lot of fun! We are all so proud to be part of this amazing study and are really looking forward to sharing more with you over the coming year! 

From the EST-project team