Table 5 Views of researchers on HRECs

Institutional safeguard

“Which, which is actually good when the committee comes back and say, this is a question, and you go, “oh, actually I hadn’t thought about that at all”. So makes you think about things and address it” [P15]

“I just trust the ethics committee here to guide me through it so I don’t make any mistakes, and they would never let me make any mistake.” [P06]

Tedious and inconsistent input

“So the feedback from ethics committees, so we had seven different ethics committees that we had to go to … and the feedback was different from each of them.” [P13]

“But it’s made things, ethics committees have made things so [emphasis] hard. So hard. And they’re just getting harder and harder and harder, and the amount of detail that you’ve got to put in, which sometimes, you put the detail in and you think ‘well I don’t know if it’s going to happen exactly like that in every single place that I go to” [P16]

“I see committees evolve and change from being reasonable to being unreasonable depending on a couple of personalities. And, you know, also committees that go from being chaotic and non-responsive to being very efficient, and, being good” [P08]

Necessary

“it’s extra paperwork, let’s call it a necessary evil shall we?” [P15]

“it seemed very tedious at first, it seemed like a lot of work, but I definitely acknowledge and understand the importance of it, because terrible things have been done without it” [P06]

“I think it’s super necessary, but … you just have to get on top of it. It’s a necessary evil” [P14]