We’re all for research on improving communication and collaboration among colleagues. But we trust that the experts know what they’re doing. You can see where this is going.
The journal Nurse Education Today has retracted a 2012 article, “Interprofessional learning in acute care: Developing a theoretical framework,” by a UK scholar because, how shall we put it, he might need a few lessons in interprofessionalism.
The retraction notice explains it neatly:
This article has been retracted at the request of the Editor-in-Chief.
The data in this article was used without acknowledgement or approval by the research team.
The paper’s author was Robin Lewis, listed as a senior lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University. As his profile page states, he has several collaborations:
Since 2006, Robin has developed a number of collaborative relationships including research teams from University of Sheffield Medical School, Sheffield Teaching Hospitals and Doncaster and Bassetlaw NHS Foundation Trust. He is currently working on a joint project with the Y&H HIEC patient safety team based at Bradford Royal Infirmary to look at the use of simulation in the prevention of medication errors
We’re guessing some of those relationships might be a bit strained at the moment.
Isn’t this a rather ambiguous retraction? Does it mean (a) he was publishing work which was performed by others in a “research team” or (b) that he did not have permission to write about some other research team as subjects in an observational study of “interprofessional learning”? From his web page, Lewis seems to write regularly on nursing screw-ups and their prevention. So it’s hard to tell if this is about scientific attribution or informed consent. If the latter, I wonder exactly how you ever get the study past the institution’s general counsel. “Hi. I’ve got draft article here detailing every time your nurses committed professional malpractice in the last year and describing how it could have been prevented if you’d only trained them better. Mind if I publish it?”
It just gets better, doesn’t it?