Published 10 December 2008, doi:10.1136/bmj.a2916
Cite this as: BMJ 2008;337:a2916

Letters

Regulation’s threat to research

Regulation has run amok

¹ National Health Services Research Network (HSRN), University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

The situation Stewart and colleagues describe¹ is even more ludicrous in relation to health services research, where the study subjects are often healthcare practitioners or organisations and the methods of investigation are interviews or postal questionnaires.

Investigators undertaking health services research are subjected to the same regulatory systems as investigators undertaking clinical trials of treatments where there is genuine uncertainty about the risks to patients. We have examples such as a health services researcher required to have occupational health checks to undertake telephone interviews, and another where an ethics committee objected to qualitative case studies in a handful of patients on the grounds that the sample would not be statistically representative of the population. The former illustrates the system’s inability to tailor regulatory procedures to the risks posed by the research. The latter illustrates the system’s inability to judge the quality (and hence the ethics) of research that does not . . . [Full text of this article]

CiteULike    Complore    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    StumbleUpon    Technorati    What's this?

Relevant Articles

It’s time to change how Europe regulates research

Fiona Godlee
BMJ 2008 337: a2986. [Extract] [Full Text]

Regulation—the real threat to clinical research

Paul M Stewart, Anna Stears, Jeremy W Tomlinson, and Morris J Brown
BMJ 2008 337: a1732. [Extract] [Full Text]

Online poll

Find out more >>