The SRA Symposium - College of Medicine

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for board members, reviewing oral histories, and available resources. Though the information
gathered from this survey could be very beneficial to research administrators, many difficulties
arose while trying to gather the data.
I encountered many barriers during the different steps of this project, which led to a mere project
update rather than a complete project. First, while I was searching the web for contact names, some
institutions did not provide information on their website about their IRB. Others were simply difficult
to navigate and required a lot of digging to locate the contact information. Those for which I
could not locate contact information I called inquiring about a person of contact for the IRB. Some
institutions said they did not have an IRB, and some transferred me several times before finding
that they could not help me. Those institutions that I was able to obtain contact information for
were sent the survey via e-mail. However, some e-mail addresses would not send correctly or no
longer existed. For these I made further attempts via the internet and telephone calls to obtain the
correct contact information. Once I had done everything I could to contact IRB administrators, I
waited for responses to the survey. After a couple of weeks, I sent reminders on two separate occasions
to please complete the survey and send back to me. As of now, I have received only 38% of the
surveys that I sent out. With those I did receive, there are some visible trends among Institutional
Review Boards at predominantly undergraduate institutions in the South.
Preliminary Results
With a 38% return of the surveys sent to research administrators, I cannot draw any conclusions
from the data. However, there are preliminary results that may represent current trends within
IRB infrastructures. Included in these preliminary results is the degree of concern of pertinent issues
that Institutional Review Boards are faced with. The importance of some of the issues reflects
other information about Institutional Review Boards at the responding institutions.
Overall, training of IRB members and investigators are of greatest concern among respondents.
Although training is of top priority for research administrators and IRBs, the training requirements
at these institutions do not reflect that concern. Of the data collected thus far, only 67%
require all IRB applicants to complete training. Institutions that do require training utilize a
variety of training sources, including the NIH/OHRP website, in-house training programs, videos,
and the National Cancer Institute website. A larger percentage, 73%, provides training to student
groups and classes, which is representative of the concern for training. Although training may not
be required for all applicants at some institutions, there is an effort to educate and train students
about research involving human subjects. At the Board level, training seems to be of greater importance
with 87% of the responding institutions providing training to Board members through
several different sources. Human subjects training at all levels is gaining greater importance as
public awareness of human subjects protections increases. About half (53%) of the institutions
have an IRB Manual, which will facilitate the attempt to educate and train investigators, IRB members,
university communities, and the public about the protection of human subjects in research.
The same percentage have a Federal Wide Assurance (FWA), which requires an IRB to have its
policies and procedures readily available upon request by the Office for Human Research Protections.
It may be that institutions only see the need to develop a policy and procedures manual if it
is required to do so. With limited resources and staffing for Institutional Review Boards, developing
a manual can be difficult and unfeasible.
130 2005 Symposium Proceedings Book