The Trust has for many years hosted a Research Ethics Committee of the local Health Authority. This committee has particular expertise in the types of research conducted in the Trust, particularly qualitative methods, and also the widespread issues of ethical concern that can arise when participants may be vulnerable adults, children and adolescents, abused or forensic clients and when the frame of research may be families, groups or systems. The committee draws on local clinical and research expertise and runs in full accordance with the governance arrangements for ethics committees.
Research governance is a more recent introduction and has been challenging to introduce for a very small Trust with, relatively, a very large portfolio of research and particularly an extremely high number of student research projects using a diversity of methods, of foci and involving local but more often, non-local participants who come as often from social and educational services as from healthcare settings. Recognising the different levels of research, and moving to the programmatic organisation of the portfolio has promoted effective compliance with the Research Governance Framework (RGF).
