Research Approvals Processes Project update: 2024 in review

As 2024 ends, we wanted to highlight key developments that have occurred this year.

Changes in the Research Approvals Processes Project Direction and Governance

Research Approvals Processes Project (RAPP) shifted in the past year to the solutioning phase of the project— developing and evaluating the feasibility of potential solutions to the challenges in British Columbia’s ecosystem of research approvals. Reflecting this shift, the governance model of RAPP was adjusted to enshrine health authority co-leadership at all levels of the project. Accordingly, the Implementation Steering Committee (ISC) and Research Leads committee were established to embed health authority leadership in the ongoing direction-setting, decision-making, and designing of the RAPP initiative.

Development of a Provincial Research Ethics Board Service

In 2024, the Ministry of Health invited Health Research BC to explore the establishment of a provincial health authority research ethics board service. This request was initiated by Leadership Council, a group which includes health authority CEOs, the Deputy Minister of Health and other senior health sector leaders. Undertaking this work between June and October, Health Research BC advanced through discovery, design, and development stages of the project, details of which can be found here. As a result, a transformation business case, design, and high-level implementation roadmap for a provincial health authority research ethics board service model was recently presented to British Columbia’s Ministry of Health and members of the RAPP ISC.

Engagement

Since its inception, engagement has been at the heart of RAPP. This engagement has always centred the voices of those who work within the health authorities, as the key players in health sector research approvals. In 2024, the Researcher Advisory Forum (RAF) was established to ensure researcher voices had strong representation within the RAPP project. The RAF is composed of a diverse group of over 30 experienced health researchers from across British Columbia with wide areas of focus and includes academic and clinical researchers, including some closely affiliated with health authorities.

From intensive engagement with the RAF, health authority subject matter experts from the five approval workstreams (ethics, operational, privacy, data, contracts), and health authority leadership, the priority issues, solutions, and approaches have been distilled (and will continue to be). Initial deliverables were determined from this information then refined and validated by the RAF, ISC, Research Leads committee. On November 28, RAPP hosted a large workshop to explore and further refine these deliverables with RAPP contributors from across the sector, including health authority staff, university partners, and government policy staff.

Advancement of Deliverables

As described in the November Update, the Initial Deliverables for RAPP are intended to deliver prioritized features to initiate change and accelerate progress and establish an iterative approach to ensure real world feedback is integrated. Here are some key highlights from 2024:

• Current state process mapping was completed and validated for each health authority in the workstreams of ethics, privacy, and operational approvals.
• The RAPP team reviewed the operational approval forms from each health authority, and consolidated and categorized the over 1000 questions from those forms into a manageable working draft. Using this draft, work has begun with workshop questions and forms with health authority subject matter experts.
• Pain points and Persona’s mapping was completed for all health authorities in the Operational and Privacy workstreams to understand frequent issues and the roles of the staff involved in approvals.
• 19 privacy use cases were identified to assist with the streamlining of privacy and data reviews.
• After establishing the direction for contracts and agreements, existing contract templates and checklists from each health authorities were collected for further analysis.
• As of April 2024, all academic projects requesting British Columbia Ministry of Health data and other data sets available on the Health Data Platform BC will go through the HDPBC stream, provided that certain criteria are met. Projects that do not meet these criteria will follow the Population Data BC (PopData) stream.