Scenarios in Medical Ethics-6: Public Health Research

Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) ethical guidelines 2017 had for the first time introduced the chapter on public health research, which is a replacement of the chapter on epidemiology in the previous version. In this chapter, guidance has been provided for studies which involve surveillance, community trials, surveys, and implementation research. The Institutional Ethics Committee (IEC) needs to distinguish public health service from research and take appropriate decisions about informed consent and ethical review. To clarify some of the issues related to public health research and ethical review, a panel discussion session was organized as a part of the 2-day workshop at JIPMER, Pondicherry, India, to train IEC members. In this workshop, six panel discussion sessions were conducted and each session consisted of 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. Five panel discussions were discussed in the earlier issues of this journal. In this issue, we discuss the sixth panel discussion on “Public Health Research.” The answers provided by the participants are listed first followed by the expert opinion by the panelists.