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Ethics and Governance

 

The APFPR is managed by the Clinical Outcomes data Reporting and Research Program part of Public Health and Preventive Medicine at Monash University. The operational team is led by Professor Susannah Ahern. Clinical oversight and registry support is provided to the operational team by the APFPR Management Committee.

The strategic direction and development of the registry is overseen by the Steering Committee which monitors activities such as data quality, and establishes policies to address issues of clinical interest or significance that may arise, including those relating to quality of care and patient privacy. The Steering Committee meets quarterly and includes project investigators and stakeholder representatives from the Australian Government Department of Health, Disability and Ageing; Therapeutic Goods Administration; Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care; consumers; and senior clinicians from key medical specialist societies and medical colleges involved in pelvic mesh procedures.

The APFPR, like all clinical quality registries in Australia, require ethical approval and governance sign-off at participating sites in order for recruitment and data collection to commence. The ethical requirements of this registry have been approved by the Human Research Ethics Committee of Monash Health under the National Mutual Acceptance Scheme (NMA) and Monash University Research Ethics Committee. Additional ethics approvals will be sought from participating sites that do not work under the NMA.

This means that the registry will be carried out in accordance with the National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research (2025). This statement has been developed to protect the interests of people who agree to participate in human research studies.