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IRBs continue to see informed consent (IC) forms that require high school or college reading skills when nearly half of Americans can read no higher than a 5th grade level, an IRB chair says.
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IRBs have full schedules, and the little mistakes investigators make when applying for an approval can bog down the process, adding weeks and resulting in wasted time. As one IRB office has discovered, a solution that can reduce turnaround time and improve efficiency involves the use of a pre-review screening process.
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Many researchers have stories about the challenges of getting reviews from multiple IRBs for a study the differing standards, varying risk assessments and the duplicated paperwork.
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One of the key attributes of a strong human research protection program is an institution's ability to optimize its resources, an expert says.
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As the technology that enables genetic research becomes more sophisticated, it opens a kind of Pandora's box to researchers telling us information about subjects that they weren't looking for and may not necessarily want to know.
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IRBs frequently worry that questioning subjects who have undergone physical or emotional trauma can cause distress, but research has shown that such questions do not tend to cause additional damage to subjects.
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Given the lack of reporting of errors and potential errors, it should be seen as good news that the number of sentinel events reported to The Joint Commission has gone up, right? The organization figures that voluntary reporting brings it maybe 1% of the total of what's out there, but the numbers are steadily rising.
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No one ever says "as memorable as a PowerPoint slide," do they? Or "as much fun as a white paper." If you want people to remember something important, you have to spark their interest. And when the material is as dry as patient safety goals, well, you have your work cut out for you.
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If trends hold in 2012, it will be the 13th straight year that nurses top the Gallup poll on ethics and honesty (http://www.gallup.com/poll/151460/Record-Rate-Honesty-Ethics-Members-Congress-Low.aspx). They are widely viewed by the public as being trustworthy and caring about what they do. Indeed, no one would suggest that a nurse does anything on the job that would knowingly imperil patients.
