28 OCTOBER 2019
By David Tuller, DrPH
Last week, the National Health Service’s Health Research Authority published a long-awaited (by me)
investigation of 11 studies from Bristol University. All 11 studies were spearheaded by Professor Esther Crawley, the University of Bristol’s high-profile pediatrician. I had flagged these studies as problematic because in every case the Bristol team exempted them from ethical review on the questionable grounds that they constituted “service evaluation” rather than “research.”
This “independent” investigation confirmed the obvious–the ethics statements were inadequate to describe the activities involved, as I had pointed out. To be clear, a shrewd sleuth initially sussed out these irregularities and alerted me to the issues; again, my work has piggy-backed on other people’s discoveries.
I have many thoughts about this investigation and the inadequacy of the recommended remedies. For now, however, I am posting the letter I received from the HRA at the same time the agency sent me the report itself. As the letter requests, I am posting the text in full rather than selected excerpts. (The formatting of the text in WordPress differs somewhat from the formatting of the original letter. Because of my lack of technological prowess, I’m not sure how to reproduce the image of the letter in the blog. The phrases below in
bold replicate the use of
boldface in the letter itself.)
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22 October 2019
