Legal and ethical issues associated with patient recruitment in clinical trials: the case of competitive enrolment.

Competitive enrolment has emerged as one of the most common patient recruitment practices. Despite being ubiquitous, there is surprisingly little literature on the nature and ethical implications of competitive enrolment. This paper briefly considers the issues associated with this recruitment scheme. I will argue that competitive enrolment creates significant ethical challenges that need to be addressed by both REBs and at the level of national research ethics policy. Competitive Enrolment