Scenarios in Medical Ethics 2: Challenges for Ethics Committees

A series of panel discussions were conducted as part of the 2-day workshop on medical research ethics, organized for Ethics committee (EC) members at the Jawaharlal Institute of Postgraduate Medical Education and Research (JIPMER), Puducherry, India, in association with Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) Bioethics Unit, Bangalore, India, in September, 2019. During the panel discussions, 3–6 scenarios were discussed 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. A summary of the first panel discussion on Scenarios in Medical Ethics 1: Composition and functioning of ethics committees were published previously in this journal. In this article, we discuss the second panel discussion on “Challenges for Ethics Committees.” The answers provided by the participants are listed first followed by the expert opinion by the panelists.