Mutual Benefit, Added Value?

The National Health Service (NHS) has recently been the focus of government efforts to retain pharmaceutical research in the UK. Efforts to foster new partnerships between healthcare providers and industry have been framed with suggestions that clinical trials can offer ‘patient benefit’ within the NHS, cutting across ethical and sociological concerns with the possible tension between doing research and offering care. This paper draws on ethnographic research to explore the sometimes awkward juxtapositions between trial protocols and everyday care, individual health and commercial profit, and thus the distribution of value produced through trials. While researchers appear to find the distinction between research and care useful, at least some of the time, both formal and informal strategies for living with this distinction may have the unintended consequence of making research appear supplementary to rather than simply different from clinical care.