SPIRIT 2013 explanation and elaboration: guidance for protocols of clinical trials
BMJ 2013; 346 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.e7586 (Published 09 January 2013) Cite this as: BMJ 2013;346:e7586
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In your guidance you are presenting an example schedule requiring a written informed consent as the second-earliest action.
A global guideline should respect their US rule that the “prospective subject or the representative
Because of these rules as well as general considerations I have difficulties in understanding why a written consent on participation in a randomised clinical trial should be obtained just during an initial visit. In fact, many patients (and maybe physicians) would refuse such coercion. I think that patients insisting on time for consideration are the reason for many violations in the dates when consent was in fact obtained [4]. Auditors and inspectors will criticise “wrong” dates as violation of the protocol. But why should the protocol always require written consent at that point?
So, please explain how to come to a written informed consent at the initial visit without coercion or undue influence?
Closely related to this concern is the rule expressed elsewhere in your guideline that “patients ... must provide written informed consent before any study procedures occur”. While I am unable to identify any guideline requiring such rule (although I know that this is “tradition”), I am aware of an FDA guidance on screening informed consents [6] that provide principles for having only a verbal consent for simple procedures at that time point. Would such verbal consent not be more realistic in many situations? And provide the patient indeed ample time to consider participation based on the written patient information until randomisation? Note that patient information sheets tend to comprise 10 to 20 pages nowadays.
So why should it be an imperative to get a written informed consent just during the initial visit?
I would recommend rethinking the procedures for obtaining informed consents. Maybe in the past too much emphasis was given on formalisms (“any study procedures”, data protection) rather than on the manifest risks of the participation in randomised research, namely the risks to get a possibly inferior (e.g. placebo) or a potentially harmful (active) treatment. I would prefer getting truly informed patients who participate on the own free will rather than (too) rapidly signed forms that might be followed by lack of compliance.
1. USA CFR - Code of Federal Regulations Title 21, Part 50, Protection of Human Subjects. Subpart B, 20: Informed Consent of Human subjects.
2. World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki: Ethical Principles for Medical Research Involving Human Subjects, amended by the 59nd WMA General Assembly, Seoul 2008.
3. Berufsordnung Landesärztekammer Baden-Württemberg. Status Dezember 2012
4. ICH E6: Guideline for Good Clinical Practice (Step 4: May 1996, step 5 (EU: CPMP/ICH/135/95: Note for Guidance on Good Clinical Practice)
5. Shapley SL. The most common findings in clinical trials inspections – an FDA perspective. 2009.
6. US FDA: Screening Tests Prior to Study Enrollment - Information Sheet Guidance for Institutional Review Boards and Clinical Investigators.
Competing interests: No competing interests
Re: SPIRIT 2013 explanation and elaboration: guidance for protocols of clinical trials
We share Kremer's sentiment that prospective trial participants be afforded sufficient time to carefully consider the information about the research presented to them, and to have their questions answered. Nowhere do we suggest that a signed document should always be obtained at the initial encounter with representatives of the research team or prior to screening procedures.
As with the usual intent of examples, the Example schedule (Fig 1) provided in our paper needs to be tailored to individual studies. Kremer's second point about the obtaining of informed consent before implementation of study procedures is also an unnecessarily rigid extrapolation from one of the examples that we quoted verbatim from a specific trial protocol (Item 10, Eligibility criteria). An appropriate interpretation of the SPIRIT guidance is that a full description of consent-related processes be provided in the protocol, so that research ethics committees can evaluate their appropriateness.
Howard Mann and An-Wen Chan
on behalf of the SPIRIT authors
Competing interests: No competing interests