Week 2 Discussion-9

I gained a greater understanding and deeper insight regarding ethical research and management within my career by completing this course. I have always found IRB teams within my career as a nurse a key piece of being able to fully advocate for our patients. Reviewing the evolution of ethics over the years really gives a good perspective on how healthcare has massively changed. For example, the smallpox vaccine did not require any guidelines, rules, or ethical codes and the trust was solely on the physicians recommending treatment. To compare this to today, we can look at the infamous pandemic we all have worked through and compare how controversial the vaccine was regardless of what physicians and the CDC recommended. During the pandemic ethical committees played a vital role in reviewing studies in order to uphold a high standard of care for the people (2020). I am a contract nurse right now and I am currently working for a United Health Services (UHS) facility. UHS is a well-known corporation as they have over 25 acute care settings, more than 300 Behavioral Health facilities, 22 freestanding emergency rooms, and close to 40 outpatient areas. When I previously worked for this company, at this same hospital, they did not have an in-house ethics committee, they only had one available by phone that was part of the entire corporation of UHS. I personally had tried to reach them and typically by the time they got back to us the problem either escalated to a worse situation or they responded a day after the nurse who contacted them was no longer there and the information was not properly transmitted. In the past year, they have added an IRB team that is in-house and you can already tell how problems are being better managed as well as the improvement within internal processes/procedures. The committee team uses human participants by including nursing staff in discussions to get a clinical perspective on problems occurring in the hospital, this also allows for education to be passed on to nurses to then share with their units. Another way this hospital includes individuals is by having the director of each unit meet with the patients themselves and conduct an interview process that will send an alert directly to the appropriate team, including IRB, if something they say during their interview warrants further investigation. The ethics department, at this point, has just one woman who manages it, however, she includes other members of the healthcare team in order to discuss and improve processes. I believe they do meet federal guidelines based on what I have seen firsthand, there is no information regarding their ethics committee on their hospitals website. Luo, & Qin, T. (2020). Managing clinical trials for covid-19: the importance of ethics committees. BMJ (Online), 369, m1369-m1369. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.m1369 https://uhs.com/. (n.d.). Ethics and human subject protection: A comprehensive introduction . ACRP. (2023, July 19). https://acrpnet.org/courses/ethics-human-subject-protection/