Belmont Report Ethical Principles

Ethical guidelines are the frameworks and standards that govern psychologists in conducting a morally justified research to respect the rights of the participants. Since the researchers are responsible for the welfare of the participants, it is vital for them to act in accordance with a specific strict code of ethics and moral principles. One of the common ethical framework used in many psychological studies is IVCARD where ‘I’ stands for Informed Consent, ‘V’ equals Voluntary Participation, ‘C’ is Confidentiality, ‘A’ being Accurate Reporting, ‘R’ is Right To Withdraw and ‘D’ as Do No Harm. Although there are few disadvantages of these strict ethical guidelines, the advantages outweigh them. This is evident from two of the

The major aim of the commission, which made the Belmont report was to ensure that ethical principles are followed during a research involving human beings as the subjects. The commission was tasked with considering the instinct between the biomedical and behavioral research and the normal routine that have been acceptable in medicine. It was also tasked with assessing the various risks that arise in determining the use of human during research exercise. The commission also was to establish the various necessary consents during the research settings.

Ethics, in our society, are the moral principles that govern our behavior, dictating what is right from wrong. The specifics of ethics changes as values in our society change and evolve. This occurs in Rebecca Skloots book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. One major reoccurring theme in the book is the lack of informed consent and autonomy. Fortunately, now there are safeguards which protect human rights in regard to health care and research. The Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research, now part of the Department of Health and Human Services, created The Belmont Report, which is one such safeguard establishing principles for all human research (USDHHS, 1979). This paper will discuss the ethical issue of informed consent within The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the disregard to parts of the Belmont Report, as well as compare the role of the nurse in charge of Henrietta’s care versus the standards of care set for modern nurses.

Respect for human dignity includes two rights; the right to self-determination and the right to full disclosure. When conducting a research study these two rights must be maintained to ensure that the participants are not coerced into participation and that they are making the choice of their own free will. Patients must be provided with all the information necessary to make an informed decision and voluntarily participate. No deception or concealed data collection can be done because it will violate the patients’ rights.

The Nuremburg Code of ethics, was established after human research atrocities in World War II created a standard of ethics. This ethical standard provided the general public with confidence and trust in that human participants involved in research will be respected and receive moral treatment. Unfortunately, the Tuskegee study undermined established ethical boundaries and it violated many aspects of informed consent, autonomy, nonmaleficence as well as many other ethical principles (Riggs,

The research ethics, especially with the human subjects, is a very complex topic, and the completion of the certification opened my eyes on many aspects of research process. I learned how important it is to fully understand the research purpose and the methodology especially when selecting participants. I learned which populations are considered vulnerable, how to balance risk and potential benefits of research, and the importance of obtaining an informed, voluntary consent. I learned how important it is for researchers to ensure subjects confidentiality and privacy. Hardicre (2014) said that the research would be impossible without volunteers, and that the researchers “must act as patient advocates to ensure that every stage of the research

I believe the guidelines put forth in the Belmont Report and implemented into the Common Rule are necessary to ensure the safety of human research subjects. These rules are designed to protect both the research subject(s) and the scientists/doctors conducing the research.

Our study will comply with standard ethical research procedures. We will obtain informed consent from our participants before they participate in our study. Our potential participants will be fully informed about what will happen during our study; in addition, they will understand the effects that our study will have on them and our research (Grinnell, Unrau, and Williams, 2014). We will not use bribery, deception, threats, or any other forms of coercion in order to gain participants for our study. The physical/emotional safety of the participants will come before the research; therefore, we will adhere to all ethical research procedures.

The study selected by this author centers around ethical and oversight issues concerning standard of care interventions received by participants in research studies. So as to address recently arisen concerns regarding key aspects of regulation and oversight of standard of care interventions executed during trials, the office for human research protections (OHRP) solicited comments from experts on what has been termed as “Draft Guidance” (Institute of Medicine [IOM], 2015, pp. 1-3).

A well given informed consent should include information, comprehension, voluntary and all those should be respect and given to the participants. The researcher are responsible to explain to the individual involved in research about potential risk in way that is comprehensive and then let them decide on their own if they agree to participate. For minor participants, their parents are responsible to consent for them. In case of Tuskegee study, participants were given wrong information about their treatment and never gave informed consent to the researchers. Beneficence is the responsibility of researchers to maximize the benefits of participants and minimize the risk. At this point researcher can explore if there are other possibility to get what they want in a simpler way, for instance they may decide to use animal rather than using human being in the research. Lastly, justice is about equal distribution of benefit and risks from the research, and all society should equally get involved, not one group waiting for the benefit whereas other us bearing the risks. Another part of justice is to guarantee the participants to get everything promised and not excessively hurt them, furthermore, the research should not target a vulnerable population based on their social status or economical

In examining how nanotechnology can eliminate a virus like human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) using the method of experiments, one must consider the ethical principles before they may conduct this investigation. This experiment involves the use of human subjects and therefore the Belmont Report will inform ethical considerations for this study. “It is important to distinguish between biomedical and behavioral research . . . in order to know what activities ought to undergo review for the protection of human subjects of research” (The Belmont Report). A researchers first concern is not the outcomes of the experiment but the participants safety. The Belmont Report states there are three basic ethical principles: respect for persons, beneficence, and justice.

There are three basic principles to consider when evaluating the ethics of a study: 1) respect for persons, 2) beneficence, and 3) justice (Houser, J., 2012, pg. 54-56). To apply these

Years and much unethical conduct in the United States later the Belmont Report established ethical guidelines for treating patients in 1979. The main three principals are respect for persons, beneficence, and justice. These categories include things like informed consent, weighing risk to benefit, and fairness. It also established rules behind informed consent such as all information must be available and comprehensible to the patient and coercion never being acceptable. This and Principles of Biomedical Ethics by Beauchamp and Childress, which came out in the same year, marked a major turning point in the laws regarding ethical medical practices in the United States. However, the underlying principle of medical ethics had been around since 1780 or so when Hippocrates directed physicians “to help and do no harm”.

“Respect for human beings involves giving due scope to peoples capacity to make their own decisions. In the research context, this normally requires that participation be the result of a choice made by the participants” (NHMR, 2007, p.3).  Freegard 2012 (p.60), states that “respecting the rights of others,” includes a responsibility for Health professionals “to let others know about their rights” and that this forms the basis of an informed consent.

Nuremberg Code is a set of 10 sophisticate principles regarding ethical clinical research on human being (Grodin, 1994). It is mainly for protection of subjects’ human right (Shuster, 1997), such as compulsory of informed consent and the equal authority of subjects as the physician-researcher to end the experiment.