Research Ethics Consultation at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (In the Field‪)‬

Although many hospitals have long offered a clinical ethics consultation service to their physicians, patients, and allied health professionals, formal ethics consultation in the research setting is a relatively new development. (1) This article describes the Research Ethics Consulting Service (RECS) that was launched in March 2005 at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (JHSPH). Johns Hopkins University was one of 142 institutions that received funding in fiscal year 2002 to develop programs to "strengthen the oversight of human subject research." (2) After obtaining the capacity development grant, the authors--faculty members at the Bergman Institute of Bioethics (BI) with appointments in the school of public health--conducted a needs assessment to determine what types of continuing education in research ethics would be most useful to school faculty. The universal preference was for a consulting service that would give faculty the opportunity, in real-time, to discuss challenging ethical issues they faced at various stages of their research, with emphasis on issues particular to their work. The authors determined early in discussions with faculty and key senior administrators that the goal of such a consulting service would be to assist investigators (whether faculty, staff, or students) in navigating the ethical challenges that might arise in the design, conduct, or analysis of research projects involving human subjects. At the end of the six-month pilot period, the JHSPH Office for Research Subjects (ORS) decided to provide salary support for the authors to manage the RECS as a regular component in the school of public health. The focus of this article is to show how the RECS is organized, how it responds to and manages requests for consultations, and what types of consultations the service has provided since its inception.