Although the need to obtain "informed" consent is institutionalised as a principle of ethical practice in research, there is persistent evidence that the meanings people attribute to research tend to be substantially at variance with what might be deemed "correct". One dominant account in the...

Recent economic and political advances in developing countries on the African continent and South East Asia are threatened by the rising death and morbidity rates of HIV/AIDS. In the first part of this paper we explain the reasons for the absence of affordable access to essential AIDS...

This article provides a critical overview of the most important issues pertaining to the ongoing debate on international research ethics. It critically describes three problems of continuing concern: 1) the question of whether the distinction between therapeutic and non-therapeutic research...

Research that follows people over a period of time (longitudinal or panel studies) is important in understanding the ageing process and changes over time in the lives of older people. Older people may choose to leave studies due to frailty, or illness and this may diminish the value of the...

Innovation is often regarded as uniformly positive. This paper shows that the role of innovation in quality improvement is more complicated. The authors identify three known paradoxes of innovation in healthcare. First, some innovations diffuse rapidly, yet are of unproven value or limited...

There has been longstanding interest in the consistency of decisions made by research ethics committees (RECs) in the UK, but most of the evidence has come from single studiessubmitted to multiple committees. A systematic comparison was carried out of the decisions made on 18 purposively...