I am working for a non-government organization providing elderly rehabilitation services. We offered various rehabilitation arrangement to our clients. Our clients are free to choose rehabilitation arrangement according to their needs.
Recently, we would like to analyze effectiveness of various rehabilitation arrangements on physical functions of elderly clients for service improvement. I would like to know: - If we analyze data with consent obtained from participant, should we need to have ethics approval? - If we are going to share findings (e.g. conference or journals), do we still need to have ethics approval?
Unlike US and Australia, we do not have local centralized research ethics committee on ethics approval. As we are small NGO, we cannot afford expensive commercial IRB services. Also, no academic institution has interest to have collaboration with us. Is there any ways for small NGO to obtain ethics approval? Thanks.