Scenarios in Medical Ethics-1: Composition and Functioning of Ethics Committees

A bioethics training workshop for Institutional Ethics Committee (IEC) members was organized on 16th–17th September 2019 at Jawaharlal Institute of Postgraduate Medical Education and Research, Puducherry in South India in association with Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) Bioethics Unit, Bangalore, India. It was attended by eighty delegates from 18 institutions. ICMR bioethics unit at Bangalore has been actively involved in educating Indian researchers on medical research ethics since the latest version of the guidelines “National Ethical Guidelines for Biomedical and Health Research” has been released in 2017. The workshop was planned to train IEC members on the ICMR Ethical guidelines for biomedical research on human participants 2017 as well as the New Drugs and Clinical Trials (NDCT) rules 2019 in addition to having topics of recent relevance such as stem cell research, vaccine research, public health research, and IEC registration and accreditation. The workshop consisted of six-panel discussion sessions. In a variation from the usual ethics workshops, we planned each session to have a lecture followed by case discussions. Each session included a series of 3–6 scenarios followed by 1–3 questions. After presenting each scenario, the participants were invited to give their comments. After a thorough discussion, a set of panelists, who were experts in biomedical ethics, were invited to discuss the scenario and provide more informed and authoritative opinions. The discussions were quite lively and we believe that the case scenarios should be of wider interest. In this piece, we discuss the first-panel discussion on “Composition and functioning of ethics committees.” The answers provided by the participants are listed first followed by the expert opinion by the panelists.