Summary
Contents
Subject index
The `effectiveness revolution' both in research and clinical practice, has tested available methods for health services research to the extreme. How far can observational methods, routine data and qualitative methods be used in health care evaluation? What cost and outcome measures are appropriate, and how should data be gathered? With the support of over two million pounds from the British Health Technology Assessment Research Programme, the research project for this Handbook has led to both a synthesis of all of the existing knowledge in these areas and an agenda for future debate and research. The chapters and their authors have been selected through a careful process of peer review and provide a coher
Ethical Issues in the Design and Conduct of Randomised Controlled Trials
Ethical Issues in the Design and Conduct of Randomised Controlled Trials
Summary
We have reviewed the literature on the ethics of clinical trials, and found that there is little agreement about what constitutes moral justification for trials. However, a widely held and defensible view, distilled from both utilitarian and Kantian ethics, is as follows: randomised trials are ethical, from the doctor's and patient's point of view, when competent patients have been fully consulted so that their values determine what is in their best interests and they have consented to trial entry. Decision theory tells us that, in the more usual situation where trial treatments are freely available, patients must be in a state ...
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