PT - JOURNAL ARTICLE AU - Vijayaprasad Gopichandran AU - Anil Kumar Indira Krishna TI - Monitoring ‘monitoring’ and evaluating ‘evaluation’: an ethical framework for monitoring and evaluation in public health AID - 10.1136/medethics-2012-100680 DP - 2013 Jan 01 TA - Journal of Medical Ethics PG - 31--35 VI - 39 IP - 1 4099 - http://jme.bmj.com/content/39/1/31.short 4100 - http://jme.bmj.com/content/39/1/31.full SO - J Med Ethics2013 Jan 01; 39 AB - Monitoring and evaluation (M&E) is an essential part of public health programmes. Since M&E is the backbone of public health programmes, ethical considerations are important in their conduct. Some of the key ethical considerations are avoiding conflicts of interest, maintaining independence of judgement, maintaining fairness, transparency, full disclosure, privacy and confidentiality, respect, responsibility, accountability, empowerment and sustainability. There are several ethical frameworks in public health, but none focusing on the monitoring and evaluation process. There is a need to institutionalise the ethical review of M&E proposals. A theoretical framework for ethical considerations is proposed in this paper. This proposed theoretical framework can act as the blueprint for building the capacity of ethics committees to review M&E proposals. A case study is discussed in this context. After thorough field testing, this practical and field-based ethical framework can be widely used by donor agencies, M&E teams, institutional review boards and ethics committees.