The Failure

What should you do if respondents hardly respond to your surveys and have difficulty answering your questions? Judith van Luijk, researcher at UMC St Radboud Nijmegen, concludes that policy and practice are too far apart. Van Luijk wanted to know what those involved think of 'the 3Rs' - a concept in laboratory animal science for decades, that stands for replacement, reducing and refining animal testing. How do researchers, laboratory animal experts and members of the Animal Experiment Committees to work with those three Rs? She asked through surveys. The response was low and several respondents indicated that they could not answer questions about the three Rs together properly; in their view, this does not reflect the differences between the individual Vs. Remarkable, because legislation and subsidy providers often use the 3Rs as one concept. It also turned out to be a mission impossible for respondents to surface all available information about the three Rs, because a sea of ​​data files and websites are in use. As a result, the aim of her research – to improve the implementation of the 3Rs in practice – turned out to be too high

The lessons

Van Luijk concludes that the concept of the 3Rs has had its day. There should be more emphasis on an approach per individual V. Moreover, the information about this must be made much more accessible. A new methodology is therefore necessary. As in clinical research, the systematic review has led to an enormous improvement in quality, can it also do that in animal research. This method can therefore make a major contribution to the philosophy behind the 3Rs, namely more responsible animal testing. Van Luijk and her colleagues are now researching this.

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