Demystifying the Institutional Review Board

Abstract

Perioperative nurses are responsible for generating and using evidence to improve patient care. To protect human participants during research activities, government regulations enacted after widely publicized research misconduct specify that institutions receiving federal funds must have an institutional review board (IRB) comprising at least five members. Board members have many responsibilities, including completing a thorough review of each section of the application and attachments (eg, consent documents). To expedite the IRB approval processes, applicants should create and submit a well‐written application. Applicants should understand that the application addresses the important ethical concepts of respect for persons, beneficence, and justice. Quality improvement activities (ie, local activities that seek to improve patient care or clinical outcomes) differ from research activities that focus on creating new knowledge. Depending on the purpose, design, and generalizability of a quality improvement project, the applicant may need to submit the project to the IRB for approval.

Research ethics in a changing social sciences landscape

“…Although the premises are different, the end result of the dominant concerns remains the same: namely, that existing ethics approvals processes have become ill-suited with many seeing the ethics approval processes as a bureaucratic rather than meaningful task aimed at institutional protection (Feeley, 2017;Grady, 2015;Hicks et al, 2021). The role of an ethics committee to advise and protect an institutional entity is important.…”

“…The experience gained will undoubtedly be valuable for those individuals. Yet, there is a significant risk that the quality and consistency of reviews is somewhat compromised when reviewers cannot be constructively critical because they have to worry about their employment security and relationships with colleagues (Hicks et al, 2021; Serpico et al, 2022b).…”