Clinical trials that study cancer are necessary for research the safety and effectiveness of promising treatments, but most people with cancer never do clinical trial enrollment  — a challenge represents in racial and ethnic minorities. Under-enrollment of racial and ethnic minorities reduces the general purpose of research findings and represents an inequality in access to high-quality health care.

Barriers at the level of health care systems and hospitals include the limited number of trials nationally and regionally. Hospital infrastructures lacking the resources to support trials, financial costs to hospitals and patients, restrictive study designs and eligibility criteria, and lack of community engagement, etc, all these factors are responsible for less clinical trial enrollment of minority patients. Many of these barriers have a disproportionate effect on minority enrollment because members of minority populations are more likely to receive care at under-resourced hospital systems where few clinical trials are available. Also, the presence of comorbidities makes them ineligible for trials.

Health care experts should be made aware of national, regional, and local trials currently taking patients and the eligibility standards for every one of those trials to discuss such enrollment with their patients. In addition, the attitudes of health care professionals about trials and discussing such trials with patients and their families present a major barrier to trial enrollment, and that they probably have an effect on the quality of verbal exchange in the course of discussions of clinical trials.

Some major barriers to enrolling racial and ethnic minority patients in medical trials are that patients are often now no longer aware they are eligible for an existing trial; they are regularly underinsured and cannot afford the greater prices associated with trial participation, and they’ll not meet the medical standards because of comorbid conditions or age restrictions. Although racial and ethnic disparities in most cancers and different situations were documented for decades, researchers, health care experts, and policymakers were not able to eliminate these persistent and preventable contributors to poor health. Under enrollment of racial and ethnic minority populations in medical trials is a health care disparity that consequences from preventable and interlinked policies, practices, and barriers on the system, individual, and interpersonal levels.