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Making research ethics work for global health: towards a more agile and collaborative approach

In this reflective essay, we seek to engage in a constructive dialogue with scholars across medicine, public health and anthropology on research ethics practices. Drawing on anthropological research and ethical dilemmas that our colleagues and we encountered as medical anthropologists, we reflect on...

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Autores principales: Chattopadhyay, Sreeparna, de Kok, Bregje
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BMJ Publishing Group 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10351231/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37451687
http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmjgh-2022-011415
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author Chattopadhyay, Sreeparna
de Kok, Bregje
author_facet Chattopadhyay, Sreeparna
de Kok, Bregje
author_sort Chattopadhyay, Sreeparna
collection PubMed
description In this reflective essay, we seek to engage in a constructive dialogue with scholars across medicine, public health and anthropology on research ethics practices. Drawing on anthropological research and ethical dilemmas that our colleagues and we encountered as medical anthropologists, we reflect on presumed and institutionalised ‘best’ practices such as mandatory written informed consent, and problematise how they are implemented in interdisciplinary global health research projects. We demonstrate that mandatory, individualised, written, informed consent may be unsuitable in many contexts and also identify reasons why tensions between professionals in interdisciplinary teams may arise when decisions about ethics procedures are taken. We propose alternatives to written informed consent that acknowledge research governance requirements and contextual realities and leave more room for ethnographic approaches. Beyond informed consent, we also explore the situatedness of ethical practices when working in contexts where decision-making around health is clearly a shared concern. We use vignettes based on our own and colleagues’ experiences to illustrate our arguments, using the collective ‘we’ instead of ‘I’ in our vignettes to protect our research participants, partners and interlocutors. We propose a decolonial, plural and vernacular approach to informed consent specifically, and research ethics more broadly. We contend that ethics procedures and frameworks need to become more agile, decolonial, pluralised and vernacularised to enable achieving congruence between communities’ ideas of social justice and institutional ethics. We argue that global health research can benefit from anthropology’s engagement with situated ethics and consent that is relational, negotiated and processual; and accountability that is not only bureaucratic but also constructive. In doing so, we hope to broaden ethical praxis so that the best outcomes that are also just, fair and equitable can be achieved for all stakeholders.
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spelling pubmed-103512312023-07-18 Making research ethics work for global health: towards a more agile and collaborative approach Chattopadhyay, Sreeparna de Kok, Bregje BMJ Glob Health Practice In this reflective essay, we seek to engage in a constructive dialogue with scholars across medicine, public health and anthropology on research ethics practices. Drawing on anthropological research and ethical dilemmas that our colleagues and we encountered as medical anthropologists, we reflect on presumed and institutionalised ‘best’ practices such as mandatory written informed consent, and problematise how they are implemented in interdisciplinary global health research projects. We demonstrate that mandatory, individualised, written, informed consent may be unsuitable in many contexts and also identify reasons why tensions between professionals in interdisciplinary teams may arise when decisions about ethics procedures are taken. We propose alternatives to written informed consent that acknowledge research governance requirements and contextual realities and leave more room for ethnographic approaches. Beyond informed consent, we also explore the situatedness of ethical practices when working in contexts where decision-making around health is clearly a shared concern. We use vignettes based on our own and colleagues’ experiences to illustrate our arguments, using the collective ‘we’ instead of ‘I’ in our vignettes to protect our research participants, partners and interlocutors. We propose a decolonial, plural and vernacular approach to informed consent specifically, and research ethics more broadly. We contend that ethics procedures and frameworks need to become more agile, decolonial, pluralised and vernacularised to enable achieving congruence between communities’ ideas of social justice and institutional ethics. We argue that global health research can benefit from anthropology’s engagement with situated ethics and consent that is relational, negotiated and processual; and accountability that is not only bureaucratic but also constructive. In doing so, we hope to broaden ethical praxis so that the best outcomes that are also just, fair and equitable can be achieved for all stakeholders. BMJ Publishing Group 2023-07-14 /pmc/articles/PMC10351231/ /pubmed/37451687 http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmjgh-2022-011415 Text en © Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2023. Re-use permitted under CC BY-NC. No commercial re-use. See rights and permissions. Published by BMJ. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made indicated, and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) .
spellingShingle Practice
Chattopadhyay, Sreeparna
de Kok, Bregje
Making research ethics work for global health: towards a more agile and collaborative approach
title Making research ethics work for global health: towards a more agile and collaborative approach
title_full Making research ethics work for global health: towards a more agile and collaborative approach
title_fullStr Making research ethics work for global health: towards a more agile and collaborative approach
title_full_unstemmed Making research ethics work for global health: towards a more agile and collaborative approach
title_short Making research ethics work for global health: towards a more agile and collaborative approach
title_sort making research ethics work for global health: towards a more agile and collaborative approach
topic Practice
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10351231/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37451687
http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmjgh-2022-011415
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