A Conceptual Framework for Enhancing Medical Ethics Review Quality in Maternity Hospitals: Integrating RBV and PDCA

HRMARS - Medical ethics review quality (MERQ) is essential for protecting research participants and supporting credible clinical research in maternity hospitals. Because obstetric and gynecological research often involves vulnerable populations, review efficiency and scientific quality have become important governance concerns. This paper aims to develop a conceptual framework linking resources, ethical learning capacity, and medical ethics review quality. A standardized ethics review system and ethics training resources are proposed as organizational resources that strengthen ethical learning capacity through the PDCA cycle. Ethical learning capacity is proposed to improve review efficiency and scientific quality. This paper focuses primarily on the conceptual level and draws on existing literature on medical ethics review, resource-based view theory (RBV), and continuous quality improvement. Future studies are needed to empirically test the proposed conceptual relationships.