Any nursing dissertation involving NHS patients, staff, or data requires Health Research Authority (HRA) approval, submitted through the Integrated Research Application System (IRAS) portal, under the UK Policy Framework for Health and Social Care Research. This is not an optional step and not something that can be initiated after data collection has begun HRA approval must precede any data collection from NHS-connected participants or records. Understanding which pathway applies to your specific study design early in the proposal stage is the most important ethics planning decision you'll make.
When university REC approval alone is sufficient
If your dissertation is a systematic literature review or secondary analysis of published data with no direct NHS patient or staff contact, university ethics committee (REC) approval is typically sufficient and is obtained through your university's own online ethics portal rather than through IRAS. This is the standard pathway for BSc systematic reviews and is significantly faster to obtain than HRA approval usually two to six weeks rather than the sixty-day statutory HRA maximum. Confirm your study's classification with your supervisor before submitting any ethics application, since the boundary between research requiring HRA review and service evaluation requiring only NHS Trust R&D registration is not always obvious from the study description alone.
PROSPERO registration for systematic reviews
For systematic reviews at MSc level and above, registering the review protocol on PROSPERO (the international prospective register of systematic reviews, maintained by the Centre for Reviews and Dissemination at the University of York) before beginning the search is increasingly expected by supervisors and is a mark of methodological rigour that examiners recognise. Registration requires a completed protocol including the review question, PICO elements, search strategy, databases to be searched, inclusion/exclusion criteria, and analysis plan. A PROSPERO registration number in your methodology chapter signals to examiners that the review was prospectively designed rather than retrospectively fitted to available evidence.