Informed consent, anticipatory regulation and ethnographic practice

This paper examines the application of informed consent to ethnographic research in health care settings. While the authors do not quarrel with either the principle of informed consent or its translation into the requirement that research should only be carried out with consenting participants, they argue that the identification of informed consent with the particular set of bureaucratic practices of ethical review which currently operate in Canada, the US and elsewhere threaten the significant contribution of ethnographic research to the creation of more efficient, more effective, more equitable and more humane health care systems.