Statutory Committees Part 4

Frank's Memoirs

Taranaki Regional Ethics Committee

In 1995 I applied to fill a vacancy on the Taranaki Regional Ethics Committee and was selected. I found this work very interesting; it was a steep learning curve.  Especially after I became Chair, and had to attend twice-yearly conferences of chairs in Wellington or Dunedin, I learned a lot.  One of the interesting things was the difference in attitude to this role through the country.  It seems to me that this goes right back to the way our provinces were founded in the nineteenth century.  

In the south, the role was semi-professional; chairs were paid a good honorarium, and the committees were closely allied to the Universities. It seemed to me that this originated in the New Zealand Company arrangements, which were oligarchical: company employees expected good pay and had a higher status than everyone else. In the north of the country, where this Company atmosphere did not hold, Ethics Committee Chairs were paid very low fees, if they were paid at all. The north has a much more democratic and free-for-all attitude, stemming from the much less hierarchical way Auckland and the other centres were founded. New Plymouth, with an originally democratic-type set-up being later absorbed by the New Zealand Company, had a bit of both worlds. 

While I was chair the system was unified and all chairs were paid on one of two scales: higher for larger (and busier) centres and lower for small centres like ours. 

I still think the way our committees worked at that stage was ideal, both in theory and in practice, and I am not sure that the modern system, or that used in some overseas countries, is adequate. I hope it will not take another “unfortunate experiment” before improvements are made.

 

The superior qualities of our system were:

 

1. Equal numbers of professionals (health or research) on the one hand, and community representatives on the other, with the Chair being one of the community people.

 

2. At least two Maori people; there was to be no tokenism.

 

3. All decisions were by consensus.

 

In the US by contrast, decisions were made by majority vote, chairs were often professionals, and there were usually only two community members.

 

There was a clear process for the assessment of research proposals, which gave weight to all the relevant issues, and produced a helpful outcome.

 

We also occasionally had to provide advice to clinicians or units of the health services on procedures or protocols they were considering.

 

Terms were for three years; I served two terms, the second as Chair. I appreciated getting to know some very fine people in other members: such as Te Ru Wharehoka, who had been involved in Maatua Whaangai with me, Pam Ritai, one of the leading nurses from the Maori community in Taranaki, Brian Irvine, a pharmacist who I had worked with at the hospital, and Richard Doehring, one of the medical members.

 

As Chair of the committee I was co-opted onto the Polytech's Ethics Committee for a while and that added a new dimension, although most of the work involved research proposals from the nursing course staff members.