Waiting List Policy Reform Is Required to Enable Randomised Controlled Trials of Elective Surgery
Jonathan G Quicke, Deborah J Brown, Bernadette Richards, Owen Ung, Catherine McDougall, Sandra Crone, Nadine E Foster · 2026
Read Waiting List Policy Reform Is Required to Enable Randomised Controlled Trials of Elective Surgery by Jonathan G Quicke, Deborah J Brown, Bernadette Richards, Owen Ung, Catherine McDougall, Sandra Crone, Nadine E Foster (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/PMC13602429.txt.
Description
Jonathan G Quicke leads a seven-author team arguing in 2026 that Australian waiting list policy blocks good trials of elective surgery. Randomized trials are the standard for judging operations, yet only about one in five surgical trials recruits on time and on target. Long public waiting lists are part of the problem. When a patient joins a trial, their queue place can conflict with the trial's treatment timing, and services are left to improvise.
Treating trial patients exactly like everyone else can wreck a study's design, while quietly prioritizing them can break waiting list directives. Both workarounds trouble the authors ethically. They propose a third option: policy that openly justifies prioritizing trial participants. Two scenarios built around a knee replacement trial, facing a national median wait of 265 days, carry their argument. Transparent rules, the team contends, would let surgical research proceed without ethically awkward choices.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Jonathan G Quicke, Deborah J Brown, Bernadette Richards, Owen Ung, Catherine McDougall, Sandra Crone, Nadine E Foster |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 13748 |
| LICENSE | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |