Exemptions from ethical review

An ethical opinion from a Research Ethics Committee is only a requirement for research projects. Activities such as educational evaluations, audits, and public engagement activities do not require a formal research ethics review. However, they should be conducted ethically, ensuring participant well-being, staff and student safety, data protection, and adherence to university policies. 

The Health Research Authority (HRA) decision tool can help you determine whether your project is research. 

For other research related activities such as Public Engagement please the Ethics and Integrity in Public Engagement with Research page will help guide you in the planning and design of your engagement activity with ethical principles in mind. 

Patient Public/Personal Involvement (PPI)

PPI is not a way of conducting research involving individuals as research participants or potential recruits without going through appropriate ethical and governance procedures. It is appropriate to ask people involved in PPI events to comment on their experiences of or views on your research, but not on their own health, condition or personal situations. In other words, PPI events cannot be used to collect research data relating to the participants. 

You may publish outputs from PPI events with appropriate informed consent in place, but it needs to be clear that you are not publishing the results of research.  

Ultimately, you do not need an ethical opinion to carry out PPI, as referenced in the PPI Ignite Network statement - ‘Approval from a research ethics committee is not required for public and patient involvement (PPI) in the idea generation, planning, design, interpretation of findings, or dissemination stages of research.’  

If you intend to use PPI events to inform your research or to discuss your findings, you should mention this in your ethics application.   

External ethical review routes 

In some cases, researchers may be undertaking research in collaboration with researchers in another institution or undertaking research data collection abroad. If a research ethics review is being undertaken in another institution that covers your research activities, or if you're undergoing a research ethics review in the country where the research data collection is taking place, then we would not look to undertake a dual ethical review here at the University of Bristol. 

We are willing to accept the ethics opinion from another Research Ethics Committee (REC) / Institutional Review Board (IRB). However, we do need to register the external ethics application and confirmation of a favourable opinion from the external REC/IRB, for our records. This is a straightforward, light touch process that is managed via the Online Research Ethics Management System (OREMS). 

If you have any queries regarding your external ethics review, please contact research-ethics@bristol.ac.uk  

For further information regarding review by one or more external bodies, further information can be found here: 

https://www.bristol.ac.uk/research-enterprise-innovation/research-governance/ethics/