Under Standard 6 of the Ministerial Reference Framework for Research Involving Human Participants (2020) from the Ministry of Health and Social Services, anyone wishing to conduct research activities in a health or social services institution must first obtain, from a network institution, a researcher status, or for physicians, pharmacists, and dentists, research privileges certifying their research competencies. This section explains how to obtain this status or privilege.

    The rules governing the granting of researcher status and research privileges are described in the section Règles applicables aux chercheurs et à leurs équipe and in the Politique d'obtention du statut de chercheur et des privilèges de recherche au sein de l’Établissement. Note: The Policy is currently under revision and updates will follow.

   The procedure for obtaining researcher status or research privileges is briefly described below. This procedure is also under revision; updates will follow.

    Recognition of researcher status or research privileges should ideally occur before submitting a project, within a few days. It concludes with the issuance of a letter to the researcher. This letter does not need to be included in the project submission form.

    The status and privileges are recorded in the researcher’s file in the Competency module of Nagano.

    Newly recruited researcher in one of the Research Centres (RC): The Research Centre is responsible for initiating the process itself when welcoming new researchers.

    Researcher affiliated with one of the RC: The researcher must contact their affiliated RC directly. If the researcher is a CMDP member (which is the case for most clinician‑researchers), additional steps must be taken with the help of USER so that the request can be submitted to and approved by the CMDP and the Board of Directors

    Researcher affiliated with an institution other than the CIUSSS ODIM: The researcher must usually obtain researcher status or research privileges from their own institution, then have them recognized by USER at recherche.comtl@ssss.gouv.qc.ca. This must be done before or at the time of submitting the research project. SSARU staff will inform the researcher of the documents required to verify that the criteria used to grant the status or privileges meet those of the CIUSSS ODIM. In some cases, an external researcher may also be granted research privileges directly by one of our RC.