Offering payments, reimbursement and incentives to patients and family doctors to encourage participation in research

Authors: Draper, Heather; Wilson, Sue; Flanagan, Sarah; Ives, Jonathan

Source: Family Practice, Volume 26, Number 3, 6 June 2009 , pp. 231-238(8)

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Abstract:

Sometimes researchers fail to meet their recruitment targets, and sometimes it is predicted that recruitment may prove difficult but it is not obvious what ethical latitude researchers have to boost participation by, for instance, paying participants to take part or by paying family doctors to recruit patients to participate. In this paper, we distinguish between payment, reimbursement and inducement. We look first at the ethics of paying research participants. We conclude that payment raises all kinds of ethical difficulties, but that reimbursementwhilst not completely unproblematicis an ethical requirement. We then look at whether some inducement to participate is acceptable and conclude that it is. We continue by asking whether the same arguments can be applied to encouraging family doctors to recruit patients. We conclude that it is right for family doctors to be reimbursed for the costs of recruiting research participants and also argue that there are fewer problems with paying family doctors to recruit patients than there are with paying research participants. Given, however, that there is a fine line between reimbursement and payment, given the potential for conflicts of interests to arise, and given that even suspicion of such a conflict might undermine trust in doctors, systems of both payment and reimbursement need to be transparent.

Keywords: Research ethics; payments in research; reimbursements in research; inducements in research

Document Type: Review article

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/fampra/cmp011

Publication date: 2009-06-06

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Family Practice is an international journal aimed at practitioners, teachers and researchers in the fields of family medicine, general practice and primary care in both developed and developing countries.

Offering payments, reimbursement and incentives to patients and family doctors to encourage participation in research

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