Methods The study included 4 out of 5 Slovenian major hospitals selected from the hospital list; 1 hospital refused to participate. The employees of these hospitals represent 30% of all employees in nursing in Slovenian hospitals and the 509 employees included in the study represent 6%. One structured survey questionnaire was administered to the leaders and the other to employees, both consisti...

BACKGROUND Although in health services survey research we strive for a high response rate, this must be balanced against the need to recruit participants ethically and considerately, particularly in surveys with a sensitive nature. In survey research there are no established recommendations to guide recruitment approach and an 'opt-in' system that requires potential participants to request a co...

BACKGROUND Strengthening interorganizational relationships in the community has become an increasingly valued strategy for improving public health in recent years. However, no intervention strategy to foster an interorganizational network in the community has yet been devised. The purpose of this study was to examine the effects on members of an organization of an intervention program designed ...

BACKGROUND There are currently several concerns about the ways in which people are recruited to participate in randomised controlled trials, the low acceptance rates among people invited to participate, and the experiences of trial participants. An information resource about on-going clinical trials designed for potential and current participants could help overcome some of these problems. ME...

AIM The purpose of this exploratory, mixed-methods study was to test an intervention to build social capital and civility among nursing students. BACKGROUND Incivility impacts nurses and nursing students, and can negatively influence patient care and the quality of nursing education. The Institute of Medicine and the Joint Commission recommended implementation of strategies to manage incivili...

Lack of clarity about the proper limits of conscientious refusal to participate in particular healthcare practices has given rise to fears that, in the absence of clear parameters, conscience-based exemptions may become increasingly widespread, leading to intolerable burdens on health professionals, patients, and institutions. Here, we identify three factors which clarify the proper scope of co...

BACKGROUND The process of obtaining informed consent continues to be a contentious issue in clinical and public health research carried out in resource-limited settings. We sought to evaluate this process among human research participants in randomly selected active research studies approved by the School of Medicine Research and Ethics Committee at the College of Health Sciences, Makerere Univ...

BACKGROUND The level of participation in research by GPs is low internationally. Previous reports of the reasons why practitioners decline opportunities for research participation have tended to recount the barriers that they describe as if they are objective accounts. OBJECTIVE By theoretical sampling of practitioners who had declined to participate in a research trial, we sought to interpre...

conscientious refusal. However, the fact that there is a non-zero probability of something immoral happening is not all we can know about a given situation, and certainly not all the conscientiously-objecting pharmacist can know about the use of EC. We can know that the immoral thing is more or less likely to occur — often our approximation will be considerably more specific than merely non-zer...

Ethical constraints often prevent epidemiological studies from evaluating the impact of non-participation. Particular problems may arise when subjects fail to respond to an approach by researchers or when they cannot be contacted because of inaccurate contact details or a doctor’s refusal to give permission for their patient to be approached. If these subjects differ from those subjects who agr...