CENTRE FOR ETHICS, YENEPOYA (DEEMED TO BE UNIVERSITY) CONDUCTS 12TH INTENSIVE SUMMER WORKSHOP ON ETHICS AND RESEARCH (I-SWEAR)

The Centre for Ethics, Yenepoya (deemed to be University) conducted the 12th edition of its very popular - Intensive Summer Workshop on Ethics and Research (I-SWEAR). The 4-day I-SWEAR workshop, transfers skills on research ethics to healthcare professionals, and inculcates in them, a sense of ethical responsibility towards healthcare and research. The Centre for Ethics under the leadership of Dr. Vina Vaswani, Director, Centre for Ethics has fostered a renaissance movement in the field of ethics, leading to a paradigm shift in the approach towards ethics in health care, and research, while enriching the curriculum of other academic fields.

Dr. Uma Kulkarni, Professor, Department of Ophthalmology and Centre for Ethics, Yenepoya (deemed to be University) is the course coordinator. She appreciated the efforts of Yenepoya (Deemed to be University) for supporting the summer workshop systematically for the past twelve years, leading to the training of ethics committee members and researchers in India.

The main focus of the workshop is to empower participants who are presently engaged in research or are serving on institutional ethics committees or are likely to serve in the coming years. All the stakeholders gain skills to identify and deal with various ethical issues arising out of research on human participants. Upon successful participation in the 4-day workshop, all the participants are given the GCP certificate, which enables them to conduct clinical trials and also serve in the Institutional Ethics Committees (IECs), as per the existing laws on the conduct of biomedical research involving human participants.

The workshop trains participants in the ethical principles and theories, ICMR current guidelines, New Drugs and Clinical Trials Rules, and Indian Good Clinical Practice (GCP) guidelines. Dr. Amar Jesani, an independent Bioethics Consultant and Chief Editor Indian Journal of Medical Ethics, Dr. Arun Bhatt, Consultant and Joint Editor-in-Chief of Perspectives in Clinical Research. And Prof. Mala Ramanathan, AchuthaMenon Centre for Health Science Studies, Sri Chitra Tirunal Institute of Medical Sciences and Technology, Trivandrum are the national faculty. The in-house faculty include Dr. Vina Vaswani, Director, Centre for Ethics, Dr. Uma Kulkarni, Dr. Ravi Vaswani, Professor, Internal Medicine, Dr. Poonam Naik, HOD, Community Medicine, Dr. Imaad Mohammed Ismail, Professor, Community Medicine, ably assisted by the Centre for Ethics faculty members - Ms. Khadeejath Farseena, Mr.Bedabrat Sharma, and Dr. Naheeda Hamza.

40 participants from within the University and outside, from various disciplines such as Dental, Physiotherapy, Homoeopathy, Nursing & Hospital Administration have registered for the workshop.

To know more about the Centre for Ethics and its upcoming events, interested readers may visit our website:www.ethics.edu.in