Research ethics

Medical professionals have a responsibility to act in an ethical manner in everything they do as part of their professional life. However, in most cases, it is only when they are carrying out research that they have to obtain explicit ethical permission to do their work. This runs the risk that people see research ethics as an exercise in getting regulatory clearance, rather than as performing research to the highest ethical standards. In this paper I outline some of the ethical issues that should be considered when doing research, and also how research proposals are evaluated by a research ethics committee.