Introduction
Healthcare has without a doubt made significant strides in the area of patient safety over the years. A cording to a report by HHS report released on December has revealed that the rates of hospital-acquired conditions have dropped by seventeen percent from the year 2010 to 2014. This reduction led to 87,000 fewer patient deaths in the hospital. And this has significantly been attributed to extensive clinical research of the patient safety problems that faced healthcare. However, clinical research is at its best when applied ethically by the practitioners. This paper will demonstrate an understanding of ethical issues in conducting clinical research.
Research ethics can be defined to be the application of fundamental ethical principles to a variety of topics that involve scientific research. Research ethics includes the design and implementation of research that involves animal and human experimentation and some aspects of academic scandal which is inclusive of regulation of research and scientific misconduct. The enterprise of scientific research is built on trust. Therefore, scientist trust that reported results by others is true-that it reflects an honest attempt to describe the world with no bias accurately. However, this trust endures if only the scientific community devotes to transmitting and exemplifying the values associated with ethical conduct.
There exist various ethical implications of clinical research. These implications need to be taken into serious consideration for research. The researcher should be aware of having the responsibility to have the actual permission and interest of those who are involved in the study. They should not misuse any of the information discovered, and there is a need to have a sense of moral responsibility maintained towards the participants. The researcher must protect the rights, privacy, and sensitivity. Over the years ethical research has had its fair share of issues the include; informed consent is considered a significant problem, this means that a person voluntarily, knowingly and intelligently and in a clear manner gives his consent. Informed consent is among the ways a patient’s autonomy rights are protected. Also, the HIPAA Privacy Rules has its implications on research. This act sets the conditions under which health protected information may be used and disclosed for research purposes. The privacy rules protect the privacy of the individual health information while still ensuring access to the medical information by the researchers.