Congratulations to Andrew Fulton, student of dentistry at Barts and the London! He is to receive first prize and a cheque for £500 as a winner in the UK-wide HealthWatch Student Prize competition in which students are invited to show their skills in assessing research protocols. Runners up Wong Li Chin and Vivek Vijay, who are both medical students at University College London, will each receive £100.

The three London students will receive their prizes from journalist and broadcaster Nick Ross at an awards ceremony held at The Medical Society of London on Tuesday 20th October. The presentation of the student awards will form part of an evening programme in which Dr Mark Porter MBE, GP and presenter of BBC Radio 4 flagship medical series “Inside Health”, will also receive an award for his media work which spans 23 years – as long, in fact, as the charity HealthWatch has been in existence.

Open annually to nursing and medical students from across the UK, the HealthWatch Student Prize is part of HealthWatch’s campaign to create awareness amongst healthcare providers, the general public and the media that well-designed clinical trials are the best way of producing effective treatments.

The competition, which is generously sponsored by Cambridge University Press, requires entrants to read and critique plans for four hypothetical clinical trials. This year the research topics included ideas for experiments testing Omega 3 supplement for children’s reading skills, and bee venom for rheumatoid arthritis.
The prize-winning entries critically appraised the quality of the protocols, providing reasons why the results would or would not stand up in the scientific community.

HealthWatch committee member and organiser of the competition Walli Bounds, herself a clinical research scientist at University College London, said, "It is essential that our future doctors and nurses are taught the key features of well-designed clinical trials, so they can distinguish between valid research findings and poor-quality or misleading results. This competition aims to encourage students to test their knowledge about what proper scientific testing entails, and thus lead to better patient care."