New Media Med Blog

Hi

We’ve developed a patients’ social networking community using ning and we are putting together an application to have it approved by the ethics committee in the hospital. It will be a closed community which is only accessible to those who suffer from a particular condition and are being treated in a particular hospital. 

I recently completed the application for the hospital ethics committee so I thought I’d share how I did it for anyone else who is going through the same process of getting a social networking site approved by a hospital ethics committee.

Here are some guidelines:

In order to complete the application to the hospital ethics committee we had to submit a research protocol which describes exactly what the pilot study would do. It needed to include our methods of observation and what analysis we would do. I found a useful document on writing a research protocol in here.
It covers all the possible ethical considerations so it was useful as a checklist for all the possible issues which might arise in the review with the ethics committee

Also I drew on past studies of the use of social networking sites in healthcare situations:

Learning from e-patients at Massachusetts General Hospital

An Online Communication Tool Alters the Way Patients Find Information

Here are recommendations for running a healthcare forum

For anyone else going through the same process these are very useful resources.