Accommodating quality and service improvement research within existing ethical principles

Existing Ethical Principles and their Application to Personal Medicine

The Human Genome Project was created with the ultimate goal of improving human health. Since its inception, the majority of funding has gone to the development of technologies and the creation of massive data sets. The applications of the Human Genome Project have been slow in developing. On July 26, 2000 a press conference at the Whitehouse proclaimed the success of the Human Genome Project. H...

Ethical oversight in quality improvement and quality improvement research: new approaches to promote a learning health care system

BACKGROUND Institutional review boards (IRBs) distinguish health care quality improvement (QI) and health care quality improvement research (QIR) based primarily on the rigor of the methods used and the purported generalizability of the knowledge gained. Neither of these criteria holds up upon scrutiny. Rather, this apparently false dichotomy may foster under-protection of participants in QI pr...

Balancing Ethical Principles in Emergency Medicine Research

This paper attempts to provide a broader view into the ethical issues surrounding the field of emergency medicine (EM) research. It starts from defining bioethically relevant features of EM and presents this field in the context of different models of health care provider-patient relationship. The paper also provides a short overview of the "post-Nuremberg" evolution of the main international r...

Research, audit and quality improvement.

PURPOSE The purpose of this article is to clarify the distinction between research and audit, and propose appropriate regulatory arrangements for audit and related activities. DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH The methods used were literature reviews and conceptual analysis. FINDINGS Research and audit overlap in various ways, but differ in terms of their purposes and the risks likely to be encou...

Ethical research in psychology: revised ethical principles for conducting research with human participants.