About B&B Hospital Institutional Review Committee

The B&B Institutional Review Committee (B&B IRC) was established at B&B Hospital upon approval from Nepal Health Research Council, to promote responsible conduct of health research and as such is authorized to regulate all health-related research conducted at B&B Hospital. Through the ethics review process, research that is not scientifically and ethically sound will not be approved. The B&B will strictly follow the guidelines developed by Nepal Health Research Council Ethical Review Board. B&B IRC has developed a proposal format based on NHRC IRB to facilitate proposal preparation and submission.

Elements of the Ethics Review Process

Technical Review by the Reviewers: Submitted proposals are screened for completeness and reviewed by the internal reviewer. The proposal is then assigned to external subject experts to review the scientific and technical content.

Technical Review by the Statistician: Submitted proposals are screened for statistical correctness by our statisticians.

Communication of Review to the Researcher: Reviewers’ feedback is given to the researcher(s) who must then respond to the comments. Principle author may be requested to come to IRC board meeting to present their proposal if required.

Ethical Review: Technically and scientifically sound proposals that have addressed reviewers’ comments are then submitted to the Member-Secretary of the Ethical Review Board (ERB) for a thorough discussion in an ERB meeting for ethical approval.

Decision Making: Normally the ERB will make approval decisions by consensus, but the majority will rule if the timely agreement is not reached. The ERB may offer conditional approval with specific suggestions to the researcher or may disapprove the proposal with clear and compelling reasons.

Communicating a Decision: The IRC chairman, on behalf of the B&B IRC, will deliver the decision to the researchers in written form within two weeks of IRC meeting.

Follow-Up: IRC monitors the progress of all approved studies. B&B IRC has the right to monitor approved studies from the time the approval until the completion or termination of the research.

Note: All the research conducted at B&B Hospital will require prior IRC approval. even a case report involving patients treated at B&B will require IRC approval, however No processing fee will be charged for case report. Following papers are not considered for B&B IRC review hence has to be submitted to NHRC for IRB approval:

Randomized control trials. (However, a comparative study with random sampling technique can be submitted to B&B IRC for review)
Multicenter studies.
Any study involving foreign nationals.
Any study not involving an employee of B&B hospital or Hospital for Rehabilitation of Disabled Children (HRDC) will not be considered for B&B IRC review.
A study conducted outside B&B or HRDC and does not involve subjects from B&B Hospital will not be considered for review.

Review time: Since the proposal you have submitted has to be cleared by a statistician and should also be reviewed by two reviewers (1- research expert and 2- subject review experts), it might take 6–8-week time to achieve an approval letter. Hence please apply for IRC accordingly.

Click here to download Application for Approval of Research Proposal

Click here to fill the waiver form

Click here to Submit your Proposal

B&B Institutional Review Committee