Observational study of 353 applications to London multicentre research ethics committee 1997-2000

Since 1997 British studies involving five or more centres have required approval from both a multicentre research ethics committee 1 and the local research ethics committee for each centre. A local committee can reject the protocol for local reasons but cannot amend it. Some researchers have criticised the process of obtaining ethical approval for multicentre studies, 2-4 but little is known about the work of the 10 multicentre research ethics committees. I describe here the work of one of them.