About this ebook
Research ethics committees exist to protect research participants and support ethically and scientifically sound research. Yet many committees face a persistent gap between formal ethical requirements and the practical realities of governance, deliberation, assessment and continuous improvement.
Research Ethics Committees in Practice provides a practical and context-sensitive framework for establishing, governing, assessing and improving research ethics committees, developed from the author's own REC leadership and consultation work across Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Ireland and international humanitarian and conflict-affected settings.
The book covers:
REC foundations, roles and responsibilities;
governance, independence, membership, competence and institutional accountability;
95 numbered measurable elements across seven standards domains, each with a four-level rating scale and critical-standard flags;
ethical review, committee deliberation, jurisdiction and the full REC lifecycle;
self-assessment, internal and external audit, and accreditation versus quality improvement;
a complete practical toolkit, including eighteen field-level template skeletons, an SOP index, a performance-indicator dashboard and an accreditation-readiness roll-up;
localisation of ethical standards, illustrated through Islamic ethics and maqāṣid al-sharīʿah;
research ethics in resource-constrained, conflict-affected and humanitarian settings; and
the framework's own stated limitations, and the importance of empirical evidence and continued dialogue in developing appropriate research ethics practice.
Rather than presenting one institutional or regulatory model as universally applicable, the book considers how ethical standards can be interpreted and implemented across very different contexts, with minimum/good/advanced practice tiers shown throughout.
It is designed for REC chairs and members, administrators, researchers, research institutions, universities, healthcare organisations, regulators, and professionals establishing or strengthening research ethics review systems.
Edition 0.1 — Pilot Edition, 2026.
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About the author
Dr Ghaiath Hussein is an Assistant Professor of Medical Ethics and Law at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. His academic and professional work focuses on research ethics, medical ethics and law, public health ethics, humanitarian ethics, and ethics education.
He has more than fifteen years of experience in research ethics committee leadership, membership, teaching, training and consultancy across diverse institutional and international settings. His work has included collaboration with international and humanitarian organisations and contributions to the development of ethics guidance and training for health professionals and researchers.
Dr Hussein's work is particularly concerned with translating ethical principles into practical systems that are appropriate to different institutional, regulatory and social contexts. His interests include research ethics governance, ethical review in resource-constrained and conflict-affected settings, professional ethics, and the development and assessment of ethics education.
He is the author of Research Ethics Committees in Practice, a practical, context-sensitive framework for establishing, governing, assessing and continuously improving research ethics committees.
