A commentary on the NH&MRC Draft Values and Ethics in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Research

Abstract

In this paper, we discuss and critically evaluate the National Health and Medical Research Council’s recently released document entitled ‘Draft Values and Ethics in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Research’. We provide a brief account of its development, philosophy and contents, and then consider how the document could be used by HRECs. We recommend that three specially targeted documents be developed from this one document, to meet the particular needs of HRECs, Indigenous people and researchers. We propose a system of Indigenous ethics advisers as a way to implement the central ideas of the new draft guidelines, without falling into the legalism and rule-following that these guidelines explicitly aim to avoid.