Research governance is important

Editor—I have experience of obtaining research governance approval from both sides, as a primary care trust research management and governance manager and as an active researcher who has recently gained approval for a project across the local strategic health authority.¹,²

Firstly, I see no reason why trusts should be asking fellow NHS employees for honorary contracts.² All NHS organisations are signed up to research governance, and that should be sufficient proof of their status. This is not a good use of researchers' or research governance staff's time.

Secondly, if a researcher has an honorary contract with one NHS organisation the facility exists to issue a letter of authorisation to accept this elsewhere, and unless there are compelling reasons not to do this—namely, no contact with children or vulnerable adults in other sites—then this is surely the way forward.¹

Thirdly, procedures are inconsistent across trusts, partly because of the lack of nationally agreed procedures, for which the Department of Health bears an important responsibility. One way forward would be for trusts to endorse the research and development forum's toolkit or produce their own detailed guidance and standard forms. In the area of honorary contracts progress is being made by the R&D forum and the UK clinical research collaboration on introducing a research passport. Some kind of multicentre process is needed to give approval to large scale projects, allowing local research management and governance groups to concentrate on purely local issues.

Research governance is there for a purpose—namely, to provide local quality control on research projects and to protect the interests of patients and staff. In most cases, the projects we have dealt with have been unproblematic. However, in a few cases—in particular, commercial drug trials—we have had serious concerns either about the value of projects or about aspects of patients' safety. It has not always proved easy to get information on why these have been approved or to take up our concerns. I think this shows that research governance, although hopefully streamlined, still has an important role.