Ethics on the floor

The work of the 'Human Research Ethics Committee' (HREC) is expanding as the dimensions of ethical practice and research grow in the clinical arena. Over the past five years, the demands on practitioners and ethics committee members have expanded, as the general public demands accountability on the part of clinical and other researchers. This paper presents a case study of an ethics committee in an Area Health Service in Sydney. It represents the views of the members as to why they see their job as important, what aspects are difficult, how they delineate between ethical/legal and scientific issues, and what are the major stumbling blocks for them in enacting their membership of a HREC. The data for the case study was collected using interviews with nine out of eleven members. The audio taped interviews were transcribed, the text thematically analysed for commonalities and contrasts, and a description of the members' perspective on various issues written. Issues emerging include: amount of material members read prior to the committee meeting, the difficulty in educating practitioners (all researchers) to write information sheets that are simple and comprehensible to laypersons, the payment of subjects for their time, the appropriate amount of monitoring to be applied on each project, the difficulty in letting researchers know that the ethics committee is committed to encouraging research and that its questions are intended to ensure the best possible project answering the researchers' questions/aims is conducted, and the slow or no response by researchers to ethics committee questions. The findings imply that reviewing research proposals for their ethical value is individual and members of human research ethics committees need to synthesise these in a committee context to make informed decisions.