Ethics approval for clinician surveys: variation in guidance and practice

Ethics approval for clinician surveys: variation in guidance and practice Whether a questionnaire directed at healthcare professionals requires formal ethics approval should, one might assume, be a straightforward question.Surprisingly, it is not.While planning a recent multicentre questionnaire study involving clinicians across several UK hospitals, I needed to determine whether formal ethics approval was required before the survey could proceed.The proposed research was simple: an anonymous questionnaire asking doctors about their preferred physiological targets in defined clinical scenarios.There were no patients, no identifiable patient data, no interventions and no alteration to clinical care.To clarify the position, I sought advice from colleagues, university governance teams and the Editors-in-Chief of 10 UK medical journals representing a range of clinical specialities.Rather than providing reassurance, these enquiries revealed striking inconsistency.Some editors considered