Jenny Donovan

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.