FAST-R Service

FAST-R offers fast advice from people with lived experience of mental health problems and their carers who have been trained to advise on participant-facing documentation and lay summaries of protocols.

young man looking at document at laptop

FAST-R stands for Feasibility and Acceptability Support Team for Researchers. This means researchers send the FAST-R service documents to review and we respond with our feedback within seven working days.

The FAST-R service receives a wide range of documents from researchers; recently these have included research proposals, study protocols, patient information sheets, consent forms, leaflets, posters and questionnaires. 

If you are a service user or carer and would like to join the FAST-R team, please e-mail fast-r@kcl.ac.uk with your enquiry and we will get back to you as soon as possible.

How FAST-R can support researchers 

The Feasibility and Acceptability Support Team for Researchers (FAST-R) offers fast advice from people with lived experience of mental health problems and their carers who have been specially trained to advise on participant-facing documentation (e.g., information sheets, consent forms) and lay summaries of protocols.

The FAST-R team can:

  • Offer expert advice about patient information sheets, consent forms and recruitment strategies
  • Help speed the regulatory approval process
  • Flag up potential stumbling blocks to ethics, R&D approval or adoption to Clinical Research Network portfolios
  • Give researchers enough time to make any necessary changes before the proposal is considered
  • Provide feedback to researchers within seven working days of an application being made.

Using the FAST-R service is free of charge. But feedback is invaluable. The team asks users to let them know the outcome of funding or ethics applications to help ensure the service is effective. We also appreciate it when our contribution is acknowledged in publications.

How to apply

Researchers can apply to use the FAST-R service as soon as they have a patient facing documents ready to be reviewed. They can apply at any time, the earlier the better. There is no limit to the number of times the service is used, but priority is given to researchers whose documents we haven’t already seen.  

Please note, we are unable to review full-length protocols.

If you are a researcher and would like to know more, please contact us at fast-r@kcl.ac.uk.