Bookmarks

WASHINGTON, D.C. - On March 28, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) issued a new Scientific Integrity Policy to safeguard the quality and integrity of the Agency's scientific and scholarly activities. Spurred by a 2009 directive from President Obama and subsequent guidance from the White House, this policy articulates the principles regarding how scientific and scholarly activities are supported and carried out, and how research findings are used and disseminated.

Specifically, the policy outlines guiding principles for the entire Agency that will:

* Protect the scientific process from misconduct and from inappropriate influence;

* Promote access to scientific and technical information;

* Maintain a highly skilled technical and scientific staff;

* Convene and use federal advisory committees ethically and transparently; and,

* Ensure quality, methodological rigor, and ethical standards in all USAID-funded research activities.

Many of these principles already align with the high integrity that USAID staff maintain when conducting scholarly activities. The intention of this policy is to capture and employ these best practices throughout the Agency and introduce new ways that USAID can enhance the use of science for development.

To read the policy, visit http://www.usaid.gov/scitech/integrity.pdf (pdf, 441kb)

Conference

Patients’ Wishes in Regard to Their Life’s End. Moral Understandings of the ‘Wish to Die’ and Ethical Implications: 1-2 June 2012; University Hospital, Spitalstrasse 21, 4031 Basel, Switzerland

Based on the results of a qualitative interview study conducted with 30 palliative care patients 2008-2011 in different palliative care situations in Switzerland, the conference explores terminally ill oncology patients’, their relatives’ and their caregivers’ perspectives on the phenomenon of a ‘wish to die’. Key ethical issues and
consequences for palliative care practice and education shall be identified and discussed
using different normative, narrative, hermeneutic, relational and phenomenological
approaches.
The research project: “Terminally ill patients’ wish to die. The attitudes and concerns
of patients with incurable disease about the end of life and dying” was conducted
at the Unit of Ethics in the Biosciences at the University of Basel, funded by Oncosuisse, the Gottfried und Julia Bangerter-Rhyner-Stiftung, and the Förderstiftung of
the hospice of Arlesheim. The project is now affiliated at the Institute of Bioethics
IBMB, University of Basel.

The document "Standards and Operational Guidance for Ethics Review of Health-Related Research with Human Participants” (http://www.who.int/ethics/publications/en/) is a compilation of 10 standards applicable to the ethics review of health related research with human participants.
The term “standards” in this book is used to delineate general principles and norms that all research ethics systems are expected to follow. They are intended to help RECs achieve high quality performance and to provide a common language that establishes specific outcomes or characteristics against which achievements can be benchmarked. The standards put forward in this document do not represent new ideas for REC functioning. Rather, they are based on requirements for RECs delineated in existing international guidance documents. Accompanying the standards are a series of “operational guidance” points which reflect commonly used strategies for implementing and fulfilling each of the standards.

This document is intended provide guidance on the research ethics review process, not to take a substantive position on how particular ethical dilemmas in health-related research should be resolved. It is designed to complement existing laws, regulations, and practices and to serve as a basis upon which RECs can develop their own specific practices and written procedures. It is not intended to replace the need for national and local guidelines for the ethical review of research involving human participants, nor to supersede national laws and regulations. Indeed, it is hoped that this document will be useful to those charged with drafting national, local, and institutional regulations and policies, and that it will enhance the quality of RECs worldwide.