title: Ethics committees in New Zealand.
abstract: The ethical review of research in New Zealand after the Cartwright Report of 1988 produced a major change in safeguards for and empowerment of participants in health care research. Several reforms since then have streamlined some processes but also seriously weakened some of the existing safeguards. The latest reforms, against the advice of various ethics bodies and the New Zealand Law Society, further reduced and attenuated the role of ethics committees so that New Zealand has moved from being a world leader in ethical review processes to there being serious doubt whether it is in conformity to international Conventions and codes. The latest round of reforms, seemingly driven by narrow economic aspirations, anecdote and innuendo, have occurred without any clear evidence of dysfunction in the system nor any plans for the resourcing required to improve quality of ethical review or to audit the process. It is of serious concern both to ethicists and medical lawyers in New Zealand that such hasty and poorly researched changes should have been made which threaten the hard-won gains of the Cartwright reforms.
authors: Dunedin Hospital and Otago Bioethics Centre, University of Otago Medical School, New Zealand. grant.gillett@stonebow.otago.ac.nz
authors: Grant
authors: G
authors: Gillett
authors: Alison
authors: A
authors: Douglass
mesh_terms: D026724:Ethical Review / Q000592:standards; D028744:Ethics Committees, Research / Q000331:legislation & jurisprudence*; D006805:Human Experimentation / Q000941:ethics* / Q000331:legislation & jurisprudence; D006801:Humans; D009520:New Zealand