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LETTERS:
Niall Galbraith, Carol Hawley, and Valerie De-Souza
Research governance: Research governance approval is putting people off research
BMJ 2006; 332: 238-a [Full text]
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[Read Rapid Response] Research governance- Let’s make bureaucracy history or let’s make research history
Abdolreza Shaghaghi   (16 February 2006)

Research governance- Let’s make bureaucracy history or let’s make research history 16 February 2006
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Abdolreza Shaghaghi,
PhD student
Public Health Sciences, Teviot Place, Edinburgh, EH8 9AG

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Re: Research governance- Let’s make bureaucracy history or let’s make research history

I was delighted by reading the letter of the Galbraith et al in no 28 issue of BMJ. As a PhD student who exactly experienced the same problems to find out who is who in this country to get research approval to be able to do a population based health study.

I am very keen to address all sufferings that young researchers encounter to do their work. With all of these hassles and endless amount of paperwork most of us despite focusing on scientific and technical points of studies just should struggle to save our souls from the trap of terrific obstacles we face just at the beginning of our long journey.

This is a nightmare for those self funded students who are obliged to spend their precious time and energy to sort out their study time table.

I also interested to focus on another aspect of this problem. Approving organisations are trying to upgrade their complicated organisational processes based on feedbacks they receive from their customers. This is logically true but this should not be implemented to the cost of researchers’ time and energy. For instance Ethics Committee have changed application form recently and also new version is more friendly than old one but this change wasted a lot of time and money from researchers who inevitably transferring their study information from old to the new version. This happens while still there are places for improvement even in the new form. For instance in the classification of studies definition have been applied for non-interventional studies actually is wrong and misleading which should be changed to non-invasive studies. With all of these paradoxical experiences are researchers misused and sacrificed in the process of research approval to improve quality of organisational efficiency within approving committees?

Competing interests: None declared