Inspired by RECOVERY: large, simple, fast trials embedded in care

WOMBAT and the UK–Australia collaboration are inspired by the principles behind the RECOVERY Trial, the UK-led platform trial that transformed treatment for hospitalised COVID-19. RECOVERY showed that urgent health questions can be answered quickly and reliably when trials are simple, large, embedded in routine care, and designed to evaluate several promising treatments over time. It randomised more than 48,000 patients across the UK and international sites and identified five effective treatments while also showing that several widely used or initially promising treatments were not beneficial.

WOMBAT aims to bring the same streamlined, pragmatic approach to birth at term. Many important questions in labour, birth and the newborn’s first hour are too large for conventional stand-alone trials, especially when the outcomes that matter most — such as death, brain injury, severe maternal morbidity, major newborn complications or event-free survival — are uncommon but profoundly important.

By building shared infrastructure for ethics, governance, randomisation, data capture, training, site coordination and stakeholder engagement, WOMBAT will make it easier to run large, efficient, reliable trials across Australia and, through the UK–Australia collaboration, across both countries. The goal is not to make research more complicated, but to make it easier for hospitals, clinicians, women and families to take part in research that can change practice.