Event Details

This webinar will focus on the below two areas:

Running a REC: Distinguishing between Research Ethics and Research Governance

Ethics and Governance are two areas of overlapping responsibility, but they are not identical. Ethics committees necessarily comment on Governance issues, but are not responsible for the conduct of research. To complicate the terrain further issues such as integrity, research culture and reproducibility are increasingly flagged as the responsibility of both ethics and governance. In this session we will examine how ethics and governance interact, what the limits are for both, and how when working together, effective ethics review and governance processes contribute to a broad culture of research integrity.

Running a REC: Focused and Effective Ethics Reviews

RECs do not approve research studies; approval, in the sense of granting permission to proceed, can only be provided by the research sponsor having considered all relevant governance issues. The role of a REC is to provide an opinion as to whether it believes that a study would be ethical, if undertaken according to the protocol and other documents provided for the purposes of review. In this session we will consider the role and remit of RECs and, most importantly, provide tools enabling them to retain focus on matters of ethics.

Speakers

Dr Simon Kolstoe

Dr Simon Kolstoe is a Reader in Bioethics and University Ethics Advisor at the University of Portsmouth. His main interest is research on research, with a particular focus on ethics, integrity and governance. He chairs the NHS Fast Track Research Ethics Committee, the Ministry of Defence Research Ethics Committee (MODREC), and the UK Health Security Agency (formally PHE) Research Ethics and Governance Group.

David Carpenter

David Carpenter is a retired lecturer in moral and political philosophy who now works as an independent trainer and consultant in research ethics. He provides training under the auspices of ARMA and UKRIO reflecting his main research interest in virtue ethics. David chairs a busy NHS REC which has been responsible for the ethics reviews of all the main vaccine studies conducted by the Oxford Vaccine Group. David is a chair or member of several ethics committees both research and clinical. Most of David’s recent work has centred on research with a focus on the Covid-19 pandemic.