The establishment of ethical committees for medical research.

Background: In this article we will describe the process that preceded the establishment of regional committees for medical research ethics in 1985. We will also take a look at the difficult initial period experienced by the committees in the eastern and southern regions.

Material And Methods: We have examined the material that has been submitted to the National Archives by the Research Council of Norway, the Ministry of Social Affairs and the Ministry of Education and Research, as well as the records of the Regional Committees for Medical and Health Research Ethics South-East.

Creating trust in an acute psychiatric ward.

The ideal of trust pervades nursing. This article uses empirical material from acute psychiatry that reveals that it is distrust rather than trust that is prevalent in this field. Our data analyses show how distrust is expressed in the therapeutic environment and in the relationship between nurse and patient.

Questionable requirement for consent in observational research in psychiatry.

Informed consent represents a cornerstone of the endeavours to make health care research ethically acceptable. Based on experience of qualitative research on power dynamics in nursing care in acute psychiatry, we show that the requirement for informed consent may be practised in formalistic ways that legitimize the researcher's activities without taking the patient's changing perception of the situation sufficiently into account. The presentation of three patient case studies illustrates a diversity of issues that the researcher must consider in each situation.