Well, we made it through another site visit from our accrediting agency, the Association for the Accreditation of Human Research Protection Programs (AAHRPP). Our two site visitors spent 2.5 days at UAMS reviewing records and policies and interviewing people from several components of our human research protection program.
We are to receive a draft report from AAHRPP within 20 business days of their May 25 departure, to which we’ll have 20 days to respond. The site visitors did summarize some of their observations before they left.
In short, we do a lot of things well here. In particular, they raved about the commitment and engagement of our IRB members, and were very impressed by those they were able to meet.
But, not unexpectedly, there is room for improvement in some areas:
Documentation of all of the IRB’s discussions and determinations was incomplete in some cases, the site visitors said. They specifically mentioned documenting that we’ve considered the specifics of things like including vulnerable populations in research, and of waiving consent or documentation of consent. So we’re are considering ways of remedying that problem. Those possibilities include making sure new submission forms are accurately and completely filled out, and possibly beefing up CLARA checklists and the office staff’s use of them.
Another issue near and dear to our collective hearts — initial training and continuing education for our IRB members. They found a small handful of reviewers who have not yet completed initial training. We’ve already gotten in touch with those people and asked them to complete IRB member training through CITI by June 15. The site visitors also would like us to more consistently track continuing education of our IRB members. While they seemed to like the blog (and noted that some of you also mentioned the blog in your talks with them), they didn’t seem to think our current method of tracking page views is adequate documentation of continuing education. So you may be hearing more specifics about the blog during our meetings (where we can document in the minutes that we’ve talked about the blog), and we may also develop some other educational offerings geared toward reviewers.
Thank you all again for your service to the UAMS IRB and for you assistance and support throughout the AAHRPP reaccreditation process.