# Jenny Donovan

Source: https://onco.cc/people/jenny-donovan/  
OnCo record `jenny-donovan` (Person). Data CC BY-NC 4.0, attribute "Data from OnCo (onco.cc)"; commercial use needs a licence.

## TL;DR

The Bristol social scientist who worked out how to recruit men into a trial that asked them to accept a coin toss between surgery, radiotherapy and doing nothing, and then measured honestly what each did to their lives.

## Summary

Jenny Donovan is Professor of Social Medicine at the University of Bristol and was co-lead of ProtecT with Freddie Hamdy and Athene Lane. Her contribution was methodological and is now used across British trials: the QuinteT approach, which studies how clinicians actually describe a randomised comparison to a patient, finds the places where the description makes one arm sound like the sensible choice, and fixes them. Without it ProtecT would not have randomised 1,643 men into a comparison that included no immediate treatment at all.

She is also first author of the trial's patient-reported outcomes papers, which are the part of ProtecT that most changes a conversation in clinic: at six years, moderate to severe urinary incontinence was reported by 13 in 100 men after prostatectomy, 5 after radiotherapy and 8 on active monitoring, and moderate or severe erectile dysfunction by 50, 36 and 40 respectively. Those are the numbers NICE prints in box 2 of NG131.

## Fields

- Kind: Person
- Last checked: 2026-09-25
- Tags: prostate; trialist; uk
- Role: Professor of Social Medicine, Bristol Population Health Science Institute, University of Bristol
- Specialisms: Recruitment to difficult randomised trials; Patient-reported outcomes; Qualitative research inside trials

## Sources

- University of Bristol research information: https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/en/persons/jenny-l-donovan

## Connected records

- people: [Freddie C. Hamdy](https://onco.cc/people/freddie-hamdy/)
- cancers: [Localised prostate cancer, intermediate risk](https://onco.cc/cancers/prostate-intermediate-risk/), [Localised prostate cancer, very low and low risk](https://onco.cc/cancers/prostate-low-risk/), [Prostate cancer](https://onco.cc/cancers/prostate/)
- fronts: [Radiation Therapy](https://onco.cc/fronts/radiation/), [Surgery & Interventional](https://onco.cc/fronts/surgery/)
- institutions: [Bristol Haematology and Oncology Centre](https://onco.cc/institutions/bristol-haematology-oncology-centre/)
- trials: [ProtecT](https://onco.cc/trials/protect/)

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