Question

You are working on a busy floor at a large inner city hospital. A colleague is working on a research study at this hospital and the population being studied are children with mental health issues. You over hear a conversation between the researcher and their co- author and find out that they have not received institutional review board (IRB) approval for their study. They are confident they will receive approval and have begun to interview subjects for the study to get a head start. What would you do? Ethical components must always be considered while conducting nursing research. After reviewing the Nuremberg Code and Belmont Report, discuss ethical components that are missing.

Answer 1

The Institutional Review Board are approached for getting approval for doing any research or study on patients or so called subjects.Here the research has been started without proper approval from the concerned organization.Though it may get the approval, starting the study before it is illegal because approval is issued after thorough assessment of the research topic whether it will benefit the subjects or will it cause harm.In case if the research can lead to harm ,serious injury or death then it cannot be approved ,so proceeding against this is a crime.

According to Nuremberg Code and Belmont report the following ethical components are missing

• No proper informed concent is taken from the subjects who are interviewed
• Respect for person is missing because the patients where just considered to be a specimen or a subject research purposes and not as an emotional filled human being
• This act is not justifiable as it is without approval. This can make other researchers too start their study without approval.
• This experiment has the risk of affecting the patient's psychologically and physically