Practice-Based Clinical Research and Ethical Decision Making-Part II: Deciding Whether to Host a Particular Research Study in Your Practice

When, why, and how to conduct research in child and adolescent psychiatry: practical and ethical considerations

Changes in the clinical research enterprise to involve practicing psychiatrists in gathering evidence in real-world settings are truly exciting. The CAPTN breaks important ground as a PBRN in psychiatry. The authors anticipate that more practical clinical trials will come. These changes challenge psychiatrists to reach an entirely new level of understanding and appreciation of the ethical and practical challenges of commingling clinical practice and research. It is time that all practicing psychiatrists prepare to meet these challenges.

Tools for tomorrow's health care system: a systems-informed mental model, moral imagination, and physicians' professionalism

Physician educators have been charged with incorporating systems-based approaches into medical education and residency training to help future physicians understand how their ability to provide high-quality health care depends on other individual and organizational stakeholders with whom and, in some cases, for whom they work. In part, this also requires that physicians accept that they have responsibilities to various system stakeholders. These changes are controversial because some fear they might distract physicians from their primary ethical obligation to their patients. However, systems theories and their applications in organizational management and business ethics support the notions that individuals can maintain primary professional ethical obligations while working within complex systems and that organizational systems can be constructed to support individual professional practice. If physicians are to commit to working within and, ultimately, improving systems of care as part of their ethical practice of medicine, then they will need a new mental model. Leading thinkers have used various models of systems and have highlighted different aspects of systems theories in describing organizations, groups of organizations, and organizational processes. This essay draws from these models some basic concepts and elements and introduces a simple but comprehensive mental model of systems for physicians. If it is used with professionalism and moral imagination, physicians might have a tool that they can use to understand, work with, and, ultimately, improve the systems of care that they rely on in their practice of medicine and that critically affect the welfare of their patients.

Clinical research: protection of the "vulnerable"?

In this age of evidence-based medicine, clinical research is critical for developing new therapeutics and determining the best way to use these therapies. To perform appropriate clinical research, researchers must adhere to ethical standards. These standards have developed in large part as a response to egregious violations of ethically appropriate behavior. In this respect certain populations have been identified as at risk of being treated inappropriately in medical research. Current ethical guidelines prohibit or severely limit what types of research can be performed involving these "vulnerable" populations. Although this might protect these populations, the lack of research on them might actually do harm in limiting their access to life-saving therapies. We explore the historical underpinnings of protecting the vulnerable populations and whether a newer ethical paradigm that would allow for protected research on these populations should be adopted by society.

Clinical research in dermatology ?�10 steps to getting started

Clinical research plays a very important role in the development of drugs and devices, including those for wound healing. The process of initiating a clinical trial can be rather daunting, particularly with the ever-increasing regulatory hurdles. Many clinicians are generally either not trained or have limited knowledge of these matters. In this short review, the present authors discuss the 10 most important steps required in initiating a clinical trial. This information is applicable not only to wound healing studies, but also to other investigational trials.