Research Governance

Research Governance concerns setting standards to improve research quality and safeguard the public. It involves enhancing ethical and scientific quality, promoting good practice, reducing adverse incidents, ensuring lessons are learned and preventing poor performance and misconduct.

A broad range of regulations, principles and standards of good practice exist to achieve, and continuously improve, research quality across all aspects of healthcare in the UK and worldwide.

Research governance applies to everyone connected to healthcare research including Chief investigators, health care professionals, researchers, and support staff.

Principles GCP

The following principles are based on Articles 2 to 5 of the EU GCP Directive 2005/28/EC and include 2 new principles, no’s 7 and 8, that are included in the Medicines for Human Use (Clinical Trials) Amendment Regulations 2006.

1. The rights, safety and well-being of the trial subjects shall prevail over the interests of science and society
2. Each individual involved in conducting a trial shall be qualified by education, training and experience to perform his tasks
3. Clinical trials shall be scientifically sound and guided by ethical principles in all their aspects
4. The necessary procedures to secure the quality of every aspect of the trial shall be complied with
5. The available non-clinical and clinical information on an investigational medicinal product shall be adequate to support the proposed clinical trial
6. Clinical trials shall be conducted in accordance with the principles of the Declaration of Helsinki
7. The protocol shall provide for the definition of inclusion and exclusion of subjects participating in a clinical trial, monitoring and publication policy
8. The investigator and sponsor shall consider all relevant guidance with respect to commencing and conducting a clinical trial
9. All clinical information shall be recorded, handled and stored in such a way that it can be accurately reported, interpreted and verified, while the confidentiality of records of the trial subjects remains protected.

Conditions based on Article 3 of the GCP Directive

10. Before the trial is initiated, foreseeable risks and inconveniences have been weighed against the anticipated benefit for the individual trial subject and other present and future patients. A trial should be initiated and continued only if the anticipated benefits justify the risks
11. The medical care given to, and medical decisions made on behalf of, subjects shall always be the responsibility of an appropriately qualified doctor or, when appropriate, of a qualified dentist
12. A trial shall be initiated only if an ethics committee and the licensing authority comes to the conclusion that the anticipated therapeutic and public health benefits justify the risks and may be continued only if compliance with this requirement is permanently monitored
13. The rights of each subject to physical and mental integrity, to privacy and to the protection of the data concerning him in accordance with the Data Protection Act 1998 are safeguarded
14. Provision has been made for insurance or indemnity to cover the liability of the investigator and sponsor which may arise in relation to the clinical trial.