Consent in India and Egypt Posted on November 14, 2007 Setting consent guidelines across cultures is a challenge, Vishwajit Nimgaonkar (bio) says.

This is an immediate concern for us. We wanted to make sure that people understood what they’re doing and that they were doing it of their own free will. As I mentioned before, when we started this work in Delhi, the hospital we were working at did not have an IRB and ethics committee.

So we gathered people around us and tried to set up a system there that mirrored what was going on in Pittsburgh. We were lucky again to have a number of people not only from the medical fraternity but also from the legal field and some family representatives. So they were able to work with the consent forms that we gave them that we were using in Pittsburgh and translate them and apply them in Indian settings so that became more meaningful.

And again we followed the same sort of processes and the same sort of guidelines and rules that we use here in Pittsburgh. Again when we started doing research in Egypt, the same sort of thing had to happen. They had their own ethics committee in place when we started working at Mansura. So it was a little bit easier there. But the same set of guidelines applied and the same philosophy of work, which is really that we want to make sure that we’re engaging people in research of their own free will.

I can’t recall any ethical conflicts because we were quite pleased to find that people there had really the same sort of issues that people have here, which is to really protect the participants in the research. So we didn’t have any conflicts that way. We had some conflicts in terms of regulations or belief systems between the IRBs there and the IRBs here.

And very often the IRB there would require us to have a certain text on our consent forms where the IRB here was not really sure about and vice versa. And that was very time consuming, and I wish we had not had to delay things on that front.

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