Integrating Health Research Into Disaster Response: The New NIH Disaster Research Response Project

Getting Interdisciplinary Teams into the Field: Institutional Review Board Preapproval and Multi‐Institution Authorization Agreements for Rapid Response Disaster Research

“…This summary of the IRB process serves as a potential model for large, multiinstitution, interdisciplinary research projects. Following current guidance, we highly recommend that more universities that embark on cooperative interdisciplinary disaster research projects use joint review agreements through IAAs to increase ethical standards, reduce the burden to participants, and streamline efforts to get well-trained researchers into the field rapidly when a disaster occurs (Miller et al, 2016;Packenham et al, 2017). In light of the 2018 updates to the human subjects protection regulation that mandates single-IRB review for collaborative research, this article serves as a case study for how the single-IRB review process can be accomplished in an efficient manner for time-sensitive postdisaster field research (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2018).…”

“…As previously noted, IRB's can take weeks or months to approve a submitted protocol (Liberale & Kovach, 2017). To address the need for ethics oversight and compliance, as well as contingent approval status for time-sensitive disaster studies that involve multiple institutions (Miller et al, 2016;Packenham et al, 2017), our team developed a NIST-CoE "core research protocol" that could be expanded on by submitting amendments for all future field studies. The lead authors of this protocol, which has been published, all had extensive experience with rapid response disaster research (Tobin et al, 2021).…”