Month: December 2012

Research ethics and governance

Hannigan and Allen 2003

This week I spent an afternoon in the company of a lively and engaged group of pre-registration mental health nursing students, talking about processes for the ethics review of human participant research studies conducted both in, and out, of the NHS. We discussed the purpose of ethics review and the organisation of research ethics committees (RECs) across the UK, before I invited the group to become a REC and to consider an application placed before it.

As it happens, over the last ten or so days I’ve also been helping prepare a new application for NHS REC and R&D approval, and in my capacity as chair of the Cardiff School of Nursing and Midwifery Studies REC I’ve been steering another proposal through our committee. So all in all I’ve been having something of a personal research ethics-fest.

One of the first papers from my PhD was a piece, written with Davina Allen, rehearsing our experiences of seeking REC and research governance approval for two studies sharing the same design. There’s a version of the full paper available here, via the Cardiff University research repository.

In this article we started by writing about the rise of institutionalised ethics and governance review processes in the UK and globally. We then shared our experiences of ethics committee inconsistency, and of the limited understanding RECs sometimes have of qualitative research.

I now realise that some of the things which happened to my proposal are not as unusual as I thought at the time this paper was written. Not uncommonly projects will be described as ‘research’ in one context (for example, for funding purposes or for progression towards academic awards) but not in others (for example, in the context of NHS research governance and ethics review where they might be classified as ‘service evaluation’ or similar). I also realise, then as now, that ‘[e]thical decision-making is a complex process, and one that is not amenable to the application of formulaic guidelines’. This is a direct quote from our 2003 paper, and it reminds me that we should not expect absolute consistency in decision-making across different committees. But there is something to be said for committees paying attention to precedent. It is also important that RECs are clear in setting out their reasons why studies need to be amended (or indeed, refused). My recent experiences of applying for NHS REC approval have been positive, in that committee members have been open to in-the-round discussions of the issues raised. I’d like to think that researchers who have submitted their proposals to the university REC I chair have felt similarly well-treated.

Mental Health Nurse Academics UK

As planned, this morning I have circulated candidates’ statements and opened up the election for the post of Vice Chair of Mental Health Nurse Academics UK. Fine people standing…with the new incumbent to be announced before the holiday period.

Peer review

This morning, with good grace and a reasoned explanation, I declined an invitation to review a paper submitted for publication. The journal the article has been sent to is a good one, serving an international and interdisciplinary readership. I published in there once, and was pleased to have done so. This particular paper (having read the abstract) looked interesting, and broadly put was in my field insofar as it dealt with matters mental health-related.

Peer review is at the heart of academic practice. I wrote about it once, with Philip Burnard, in this paper published in Nurse Education Today. To write articles for publication in scholarly journals, and/or to write grant applications for research funders, is to submit to the process. In return for having other people read what I write I am happy to play my part in the system, and to take my share of papers to review.

It is certainly true that peer review is far from perfect, as the former editor of the BMJ spells out here, and as Stephen Mumford writes here in a recent edition of Times Higher Education. But it might be the best system we’ve got, even if it could be improved. And for me, today: why the refusal to review? Simply put, the article I was invited to give an opinion on was reporting findings from a study using specialised methods in which I entirely lack expertise. Declining was the only way to go. Maybe a better match next time.

On not lying-in

I’m not very good at lying-in. Once I’m awake (which, on most mornings, is earlier rather than later) I’m up. It’s then a matter of creeping downstairs to do some soundless chores, before making my mandatory mug of strong coffee and grabbing breakfast. Whilst in the kitchen I’ll have the radio on, tuned (at low volume) to BBC R4, for company. Invariably I’ll then make my way to the computer: the very one I’m sitting in front of now.

This blog is about a week old, and a number of my posts have started life in this pre-dawn window of opportunity. Papers I’ve written for publication have often been chipped away at at a similar time. So far the relationship between my writing-for-this-blog and my writing-for-journal-submission has been one-way, in that I’ve used this space to share ideas rehearsed at greater length in already-published academic articles. Indeed, this was one of my purposes in setting this site up: I wanted to experiment with blogging as a way of promoting work, and as a means of engaging beyond the production of lengthy outputs for paid-for journals.

It now occurs to me that this blog might also become a working space for the development of new ideas, and that the relationship between writing-for-journals and writing-for-the-blog might sometimes run in the opposite direction. This forum will never be a substitute for my academic journal-writing, and I’m not proposing to dump heaps of unmanaged data here (even if I had it!) for some kind of public write-in. But I might bring fledging ideas which I’m in the process of working through in my head.

Which brings me to…

At this year’s Network for Psychiatric Nursing Research conference I gave a talk titled, ‘Past, present and possible future in the system of community mental health care’. I intended this to be a kind of reflective run-through, taking in a decade-and-a-half of research and writing in the field. I wanted to touch lightly over a string of studies and papers I’ve had the good fortune to be involved in, and to knit together something cumulative around the themes of system interrelatedness, complexity and change. I’m not sure I pulled this ambition off in that forum, and in the longer term I’d like to work this all up into a full-blown paper. This space might become a repository of some sort for this type of work-in-progress. We’ll have to see, though, and I’ll need to think through how this might happen.

Unrelatedly: I’ll be opening the Mental Health Nurse Academics UK Vice Chair elections on Monday. My congratulations, too, to Louise Poley (Consultant Nurse in Substance Misuse, Cardiff and Vale UHB) for becoming RCN Wales Nurse of the Year. Lou has done outstanding work improving the health of people who are homeless, collaborating with partners across the statutory and non-statutory sectors.

Now I’m off out for run. Thanks, again, for reading.