Document is current

Article History

Received: 20 September 2020

Accepted: 28 December 2020

First Online: 12 January 2021

Ethics approval and consent to participate

: The study was approved by the ethics committee of the University Hospital Aachen affiliated to RWTH Aachen University (reference number EK194/16). In consultation with our correspondent and co-author in China, S. Zhang, no special approval by a Chinese ethics committee was needed to conduct a qualitative study in China with a study design like ours.All participants explicitly consented to do the interview. From the first participants, the interviewer tried to obtain written informed consent. Yet, most participants disapproved the request of signing a form, which created a feeling of distrust towards the interviewer. This impeded the conducting of the interviews and therefore data collection. Thus, we decided to proceed obtaining verbal informed consent from the participants. This was acceptable for all participants and did not impede further the data collection. Due to this short-term change of procedure, verbal informed consent could not be explicitly approved by the ethics committee.

: Not applicable.

: The authors declare that they have no competing interests.