Researchers fed up with project delays due to red tape are encouraged to sign a petition calling for a more streamlined national approach to ethics and governance approvals.
The petition says “Millions of dollars worth of Australian health and medical researchers’ time is being wasted on: submitting the same forms to multiple review committees; or submitting forms for negligible risk research that should not need formal oversight.”
It said excessive paperwork slows collaborative research projects and clinical trials, and in some cases may even prevent research from taking place.
One of the instigators of the petition, biostatistician Professor Adrian Barnett told the limbic every researcher has a “horror story”.
“Colleagues have had a number of studies where the ethics has taken longer than the actual research,” he said.
“We had a project – just doing a survey across 50 hospitals – and the ethics approvals delayed the project by 17 months and cost us $348,000.”
“Researchers are giving up on projects before they have even started. Now that causes harm.”
He said the hidden harms associated with research delays or research not even being conducted had to be weighed against the very small risk of harms associated with a research project.
Professor Barnett, from the Institute of Health and Biomedical Innovation at QUT, said many other countries do not have the levels of checking that Australia does.
“… and it is really slowing us down. Certainly the easier areas to fix are the low to negligible risk projects. In the US, they have a self-certification system and we could switch to that system. The most litigious nation on the planet uses a self-certification system.”
He said many of the low risk projects being delayed were secondary data analysis, surveys of hospital staff asking non-confronting questions, or projects using economic and accounting data.