A disjointed and complicated approach to ethics approval and research governance is deterring researchers from potentially ground-breaking work, says a leading South Australian rheumatologist and academic.
Professor Catherine Hill, staff specialist at the Queen Elizabeth and Royal Adelaide Hospitals, Clinical Professor at the University of Adelaide and Chair of the South Australian Medicines Evaluation Panel, said the there was an urgent need to simplify, homogenise and nationalise the human ethics approval process for non-clinical trial studies.
Any national standard must be mutually accepted across all states and territories to reduce the burden of administration and allow researchers to get on with the job, she said.
“I think patients would be really surprised if they knew what sort of hoops we had to jump through just to get a study going,” she told the limbic. “It doesn’t encourage people into research – it is a deterrent.”
Professor Hill was commenting on an observational study she co-authored that was published in the Australasian Medical Journal.
The study observed the processes involved in establishing a nationwide study to investigate the molecular aetiology of Giant Cell Arteritis (GCA).
Study researchers hit a roadblock recruiting people to the genetic study, so they decided to take a different approach and try to access some of the 2500 specimens from biopsies taken from patients with GCA and archived at pathology centres around the country.