Multicentre research: negotiating the ethics approval obstacle course

To the Editor: Roberts et al1 state that the National Health and Medical Research Council’s National statement on ethical conduct in research involving humans2 clearly outlines that, once approval has been gained from one human research ethics committee (HREC), other sites should accept that approval. Nowhere does the national statement state this.

What Roberts et al appear not to appreciate is that research projects may consume resources within a health service. The HREC might also have the responsibility of ensuring that the tasks required for successful completion of research can be performed without compromising the standard of care of the health facilities in which the research is to be performed. The project in question required the extraction of medical records — someone has to do this and be paid for the task. While centralisation of human research ethics approval might make the task of approval of research faster, each administrative unit has to be able to decide whether to allow participation in a project given its current level of service demand. Approval for multicentre research will therefore still take time whether or not central ethics approval is obtained, and researchers will not find an easy solution to this.