BMJ  2004;329 (31 July), doi:10.1136/bmj.329.7460.0

New ethics committee regulations hinder research

Five papers and an editorial show how ethics committees impede, delay, and sometimes distort research. Ward and colleagues (p 277) believe that ethical committees' requirements regarding patient confidentiality resulted in a poor response rate from their community controls; an inadvertent change that Jones and Bamford (p 280) made to their protocol resulted in suspension of the project and incomplete datasets, affecting the validity of their study; Wald and colleagues (p 282) recount their experience of a 68 page application form that took 40 hours to fill in, and Jamrozik (p 286) reflects on a similar experience; and Parker and colleagues (p 288) scrutinise the boundary between research and clinical practice in rare genetic disorders.

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