Annual report shows OCREB making solid progress
The OCREB Annual Report
The Ontario Cancer Research Ethics Board (OCREB) has built on its successes with another year of solid growth, achieving the majority of its goals for 2008-2009, making progress in other areas of its mandate and spreading the word about the success of its unique model for research ethics review of multi-centred clinical trials.
OCREB was established in 2004 in response to feedback from stakeholders in academia, industry and the health care system, all of whom reported that institutional-level research ethics review – which requires a research ethics board at each institution to individually review proposals for clinical trials, even if identical study protocols are proposed for multiple centres in the same jurisdiction – is a source of delay, duplication and frustration.
OCREB, which was launched by the Ontario Cancer Research Network (OCRN) and continues as an arm’s-length program of OCRN’s successor, the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, uses a centralized approach to remedy this problem. With the credo of “do it once and do it well,” OCREB puts studies before an oncology-specific ethics board composed of oncologists and other health care professionals, ethicists, cancer survivors and representatives of the community who are familiar with cancer issues. If a study is approved by OCREB, it can be implemented at any of the 17 Ontario cancer centres using OCREB – which includes the cancer centres at the majority of the province’s major academic hospitals and the province’s only cancer-care hospital.
The 2008-2009 Annual Report tracks the organization’s progress against pre-defined goals, highlights accomplishments beyond these goals and discusses OCREB’s overall direction. It reports that OCREB met or exceeded most goals and also launched new initiatives to take advantage of opportunities that arose throughout the year.
In 2008-2009 membership of the research ethics board was expanded, an additional centre joined and the OCREB office staff was successful in its efforts to speed up principal investigator response times by liaising and following up with staff at cancer centres. (Principal investigator response time refers to the amount of time it takes a principal investigator to respond to queries and requests for changes after initial review by the research ethics board. The study cannot proceed to final review and approval until this response is received. This timeframe is currently the longest part of the OCREB process.)
OCREB also recruited Alison van Nie, a research ethics officer with extensive background in research ethics education. Van Nie was a presenter at OCREB’s Annual Education Day in February 2009, which gave staff at its member-centres an opportunity to hear from experts in bio-ethics and apply the broad principles of research ethics – patient protection, justice and a fair balancing of risk – to their day-to-day work at the province’s hospitals and cancer centres.
In addition to Annual Education Day, OCREB continued and enhanced a number of other outreach activities in 2008-2009, including regular teleconferences with staff at cancer centres to discuss research ethics issues and presentations at international conferences of research ethics professionals to spread the word about OCREB’s unique multi-centred model.
