It seems that in many cases, IRB offices are struggling with processing and turnaround time of new and revised protocols. This can lead to overloaded agendas, which may not allow all IRB members enough time to review every item on the agenda prior to the IRB meetings. Jon Newlin, assistant director in the Office of the HRPP at North Shore-LIJ, explained during his presentation at the 2015 Advancing Ethical Research Conference (AER15), "Transformation to an All-Videoconference Flexible IRB Model: One Institution’s Experience," that to rectify this problem his institution consolidated their IRBs into one roster. In this process, they reduced their IRB from more than 20 voting members to nine with 60 [...] Read more
Many moons ago, I walked into a large meeting room to attend my first session of my first PRIM&R event. I was even more green than that: I’d only been involved with my IRB for a month or so, and was still getting accustomed to the lingo—and I wasn’t anything approaching a scientist. Far from it, I was a mere six months in to my internship and residency in healthcare chaplaincy. So, when I walked into the Advanced Research Ethics pre-conference session of the 