Standardising and monitoring the delivery of interventions and comparators in randomised clinical trials: a scoping review

Surgical RCT's often use comparator interventions which are used to showcase the results of the trial intervention. There are several reporting checklists for RCTs and trial interventions. However to date there are no standardised methods of reporting the comparators that are used within surgical trials. The comparator intervention, even if this is standard care, impacts on the interpretation of results and thus ensuring standardisation of reporting is essential to interpretation of results. This scoping review will explore current published surgical RCTs and work towards creating a typology of comparator interventions which could be used in future reporting.