RMH entered into a Memorandum of Understanding with 11 partner organisations to streamline and harmonise ethical and governance review of all multicentre human health research.
The proximity and levels of collaboration across health care, medical research and academia throughout Parkville and our affiliated University of Melbourne partners, through the Melbourne Academic Centre for Health, provides us with a great opportunity to build a seamless and streamlined system that facilitates changes in clinical practice in response to evidence generated among our group.
To realise this goal, the partners have established a Steering Committee to oversee, develop and implement a comprehensive framework to deliver a highly efficient and effective overarching system for streamlined, harmonised and standardised ethical and governance review within our group.
This initiative includes participation in the existing National Mutual Acceptance Program for single ethical review of multicentre clinical trials and any new state or national streamlining initiatives that may arise in the future.
Partners
- Austin Health
- Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health
- Royal Melbourne Hospital
- Murdoch Children’s Research Institute (MCRI)
- Northern Health
- Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre
- Royal Children’s Hospital
- Royal Women’s Hospital
- St Vincent’s Hospital Melbourne
- University of Melbourne
- Walter and Eliza Hall Institute
- Western Health
Objectives
- To streamline and harmonise ethical (including scientific) and governance review of human research projects within and across partner institutions. This will create efficiencies of scale for our Research Offices through the sharing of best practice, resources and processes, saving time and money, thereby facilitating, encouraging and supporting excellent research and health outcomes
- To enhance our investigator-led research capacity to utilise advances in genomics and information technology such as data linkage and electronic medical records. We must do this to stay globally competitive
- To facilitate and build our capacity to conduct externally sponsored clinical trials
- Reviewing HRECs
Our model for streamlined ethical review allows investigators to submit multicentre human health research ethics applications (involving two or more partners) to any of the five NHMRC-certified HRECs within our group:
- St Vincent’s Hospital Melbourne
- Royal Melbourne Hospital
- Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre
- Austin Health
- Royal Children’s Hospital
Key features of the streamlined model
- Five NHMRC-certified HRECs – providing Partners access to weekly HREC review
- Existing NHMRC-certified HRECs retained – line managed by current host institutions
- A coordinated, centrally located Research Support Service – supporting ethics and governance practices and procedures through provision of resources, information, templates
- Expert Scientific Review Panel
- Existing (non-NHMRC certified for multicentre research) HRECs at partner institutions retained for the review of single-site projects
Level 2 South West
300 Grattan St, Parkville, Victoria