News

The Current Developments in Cluster Randomised Trials and Stepped Wedge Designs annual conference recently took place in London (November 14-15, 2022). This meeting gathers together the top researchers worldwide in cluster randomised trials and stepped wedge designs: talks at this year's event were both in-person and online.

The Cluster Cluster was well represented, with Rhys Bowden, Andrew Forbes, Kelsey Grantham, Jessica Kasza and Ehsan Rezaei all presenting full-length talks. Andrew kicked the conference off with a talk about multifactorial cross-over designs that allow for multiple interventions to be assessed simultaneously, with high power to detect (some of the) interactions between these interventions. Jess soon followed with a talk about how decaying intracluster correlation parameters can be extracted from estimated aggregate intracluster correlations. Ehsan spoke about how efficient and powerful incomplete stepped wedge designs can be found through iterative removal of observations that don’t contribute a lot of information. Kelsey presented her work on the staircase design – a promising new set of incomplete stepped wedge designs. Rhys closed the live talks of the conference with a discussion of how intracluster correlations for binary data can be well-estimated using linear mixed models and associated approaches.

The Cluster Cluster had the opportunity to meet and network with colleagues from around the world. We were reminded of the value of meeting with collaborators in-person!