Adults with Incapacity Amendment Act: consultation
Part eight: proposals to amend the Adults with Incapacity Act in respect of the governance of incapacitated adults participating in research
Proposal 91: permitting more than one ethics committee to review research proposals involving adults with incapacity
Currently, only a single ethics committee in Scotland is legally allowed to assess such research applications that involve adults with incapacity as participants (Adults with Incapacity (AWI) research). This committee is known as Scotland A Research Ethics Committee (Scotland A REC). If the volume of AWI research in Scotland were to increase in the coming years, this could lead to workload issues at this lone committee and lead to a bottleneck in the overall approvals process of AWI research in Scotland. Secondly, other ethics committees in the UK can offer an appeal system, whereby if researchers feel their application has been wrongly issued an unfavourable opinion by one committee, they can request a second opinion and that the application is reviewed by a different committee. This is not possible with AWI research applications in Scotland as there is only one committee capable of reviewing such studies.
This proposal asks whether legislation should be amended to permit the establishment of more than one ethics committee in Scotland that is capable of reviewing research involving adults with incapacity.