To make it easier for their patients to volunteer, surgeries such as Papworth Surgery in Cambridgeshire are joining a GP network established by clinical trials centre LCG Bioscience.
Papworth Surgery is one of more than 20 practices in the east of England involved in the initiative, which aims to identify patients that may wish to help to develop improved treatments for their conditions.
'By participating in the GP network, I feel that we are contributing in some small way to pushing back the frontiers of medicine,' said Dr David Cronk of Papworth Surgery.
'We will only get new drugs and treatments if someone is prepared to test them,' he added.
Treatments for asthma, Parkinson's disease, type II diabetes, obesity, psoriasis and insomnia have been among the recent studies that have needed patient involvement.
Everyone gains from the GP participation.
At Cronk's surgery, the fee paid for his participation is donated to the charity Papworth Surgery Patients Link and contributes towards equipment, for example, the recent acquisition of an ECG machine.
Fal Gunchla, the acting head of volunteer recruitment at LCG Bioscience, explains that if drug studies only use young, healthy men, then you don't get a realistic picture of how treatments will affect a wider variety of people.
However, patients with a particular condition can vary widely and to ensure that the data collected is representative, the pharmaceutical companies sponsoring the trials require subjects to have very specific conditions.
This means that only a few people qualify.
'Our surgery has a catchment of 6,000 people,' said Dr Cronk.
'When we are given details of a prospective trial we look through our database to identify patients that have those conditions and might consider participating in a trial.
'The numbers are very small, for a recent trial of type II diabetics, only two or three met the trial criteria out of 200 patients with that condition.
'It is not hugely time consuming for us, it takes about an hour to trawl the database and send out letters to the patients, but the uptake is very low and this is disappointing,' he added.
Gunchla said that more patients would volunteer if they had a better understanding of what happens on a clinical trial.
As well as the psychological boost of being altruistic, patients participating in a trial also receive a full medical and a remuneration, which can be very helpful for those who are unable to work through illness.
The need for patients is increasing as the new generation of medicines, currently being developed, work in different ways to the older drugs.
