Family Health Ministries' mission is to support international communities in their efforts to build and sustain healthy families.

One strategy that FHM uses to to achieve this goal is to partner with local health care providers to help them evaluate local health issues through a process called community-based research.  This involves collecting and analyzing health care data from their communites for the purpose of improving the delivery of health care.

Organizations that do research have several responsibilities.  One of these is to protect the rights of research subjects.  In a country like Haiti, protecting research subjects means understanding research ethics as well as local laws, cultural factors, etc.  This is accomplished by having the research protocols reviewed by experts and community representatives who serve on committees called institutional review boards or IRBs.  All of FHM's research is reviewed by two IRBs.  One of the boards is located in the United States and the other is in Haiti in the community where the research is being conducted. 

FHM's Haitian IRB includes health care providers, a lawyer, and community representatives who live in the communities where the research is being conducted.  This insures that the review considers ethical or legal issues that are unique to the community where the research is being conducted.  Because Haiti did not have an IRB available to review FHM's research, FHM formed a Haitian IRB with community representatives from Port-au-Prince, Leogane and Fondwa and begain ethics training in June of 2008.  This IRB is registered with the US Department of Health and Human Services, as of June 2008.  FHM trains the committee members in research ethics by using training modules prepared by the Collaborative Institutional Training Initiative, which is the same organization that provides ethics training to researchers at Duke University.

Current US IRBs affiliated with Family Health Ministries.

• Duke University, Durham, NC
• University of Florida,
• Western IRB, Seattle, WA

Family Health Ministries' IRB in Haiti:

• Misyon Sante Fanmi Ayisyen
  Registered with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in June 2008. (IRB 6585/FWA 13290).
• Meets three (3) times a year to review current and new projects. (2011: February, July, December)

Human Protections Administrator:

- Nicole Tinfo, PhD, Director of Research for FHM

• Reference Library

  45CFR4 - US Regulations published in June 2005 for the Protection of Human Subjects

  The Belmont Report - attempts to summarize the basic ethical principles identified by the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research created in 1974 as a result of the US Congress' passing the National Research Act (Pub. L. 93348).

For more information, call Family Health Ministries in the US at 919-382-5500. You may also contact Family Health Ministries Dr. Nicole Tinfo, Research Director