Policy Audit Report

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According to the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (2015), a clinical trial is defined as “any research study that prospectively assign human participants or groups of humans to one or more health-related interventions to evaluate the effects on health outcomes” (Goldacre, 2012). There are many issues revolving around clinical trials registrations, however the core issues involve those which indicate that only the positive cases, which support their hypothesis, are published (Goldacre, 2012). Similarly, negative results are going missing in the database and they are not being published regardless of journals being open to negative results publication. Researchers conduct studies either supporting or not supporting a claim, …show more content…

Although, as previously stated, there has been improvements made, but there is also more that can be done to make improvements more extravagant. Goldacre (2015), suggests that the next steps include audits, both policy audits and personal audits. A policy audit consists of numerous steps: first, you must establish a standard of good practice, then the current practice must be measured, analyzed and then feedback needs to be given. Next, implements need to be changed and then the audit can be re-evaluated and practiced (Goldarce, 2015). The point of the policy audit, created by World Health Organization (WHO), is to rank all the publishing companies to determine how many are currently publishing both positive and negative results. A performance audit is similar, however it determines how well publications are succeeding at the policy audit. A company which is succeeding greatly, is called clinicaltrial.ca; which upload any trial ever conducted, including both the positive and negative results articles (Goldacre, 2015). The issue with the performance audit is that in order for them to publish your article, it requires at least 40 hours of your own time put into the article, and for every hour put into the paper, it costs $50.00. Therefore, each trial costs approximately $2,000.00 to publish. By using both the policy and performance audits, individual trial audits can begin working on research for a complete audit of every trial ever done. This would allow for an absolute value of companies which register and publish their article, and which hide their negative results (Goldacre, 2015). From here, the last step is for physicians to choose pharmaceutical companies which publish all their work, and to stop using the companies which hide their negative results (Goldacre,

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