Reports of site monitoring visits by institutional ethics committees in an Indian tertiary care hospital: A retrospective analysis

Ethics Committees: Structure, Roles, and Issues

An Ethics Committee (EC) is an independent body composed of members with expertise in both scientific and nonscientific arenas which functions to ensure the protection of human rights and the well-being of research subjects based on six basic principles of autonomy, justice, beneficence, nonmaleficence, confidentiality, and honesty. MEDLINE, Scopus, and Directory of Open Access Journals were searched for studies relevant to this topic. This review is focused on the types of research articles that need EC approval, the submission process, and exemptions. It further highlights the constitution of ECs, their duties, the review process, and the assessment of the risk-benefit of the proposed research including privacy issues. It's pertinent for academicians and researchers to abide by the rules and regulations put forth by ECs for upholding of human rights and protecting research subjects primarily, as well as avoiding other issues like retraction of publications. Despite various issues of cost, backlogs, lack of expertise, lesser representation of laypersons, need for multiple approvals for multisite projects, conflicts of interest, and monitoring of ongoing research for the continued safety of participants, the ECs form the central force in regulating research and participant safety. Data safety and monitoring boards complement the ECs for carrying out continuous monitoring for better protection of research subjects. The establishment of ECs has ensured safe study designs, the safety of human subjects along with the protection of researchers from before the initiation until the completion of a study.

An analysis of deficiencies in the ethics committee data of certain interventional trials registered with the Clinical Trials Registry-India

There is widespread agreement that clinical trials should be registered in a public registry, preferably before the trial commences. It is also important that details of each trial in the public record are complete and accurate. In this study, we examined the trial sites and ethics committee (EC) data for 1359 recent Phase 2 or Phase 3 interventional trials registered with Clinical Trials Registry-India (CTRI), to identify categories of problems that prevent the clear identification of which EC approved a given site. We created an SQLite database that hosted the relevant CTRI records, and queried this database, as needed. We identified two broad categories of problems: those pertaining to the understanding of an individual trial and those to adopting a data analytics approach for a large number of trials. Overall, about 30 problems were identified, such as an EC not being listed; an uninformative name of the EC that precluded its clear identification; ambiguity in which EC supervised a particular site; repetition of a site or an EC; the use of a given acronym for different organizations; site name not clearly listed, etc. The large number of problems with the data in the EC or site field creates a challenge to link particular sites with particular ECs, especially if a programme is used to find the matches. We make a few suggestions on how the situation could be improved. Most importantly, list the EC registration number for each EC, merge the site and EC tables so that it is clear which EC is linked to which site; and implement logic rules that would prevent a trial from being registered unless certain conditions were met. This will raise user confidence in CTRI EC data, and enable data based public policy and inferences. This will also contribute to increased transparency, and trust, in clinical trials, and their oversight, in India.

Coloniality and Psychology: From Silencing to Re-Centering Marginalized Voices in Postcolonial Times

We adopt a decolonizing framework in this article to examine how legacies of colonialism and coloniality continue to manifest in Euro-American psychology. The population of India is now over 1.2 billion people with over 356 million youth they make up the world’s largest youth population, but their stories remain largely invisible in Euro-American psychology. For this article, we draw on a growing body of research by decolonial theorists and our ethnographic research. We argue that Euro-American psychological science now reworks the old forms of imperialism and domination in neoliberal contexts of globalization. In particular, we analyze (a) how mainstream psychological knowledge of “culture” and “diversity” have reinforced a neoliberal self in postcolonial India; (b) the varied ways in which identities, values, and mental health experiences of marginalized communities have been silenced and ignored through the application of Euro-American psychiatric and colonial psychological knowledge; and (c) how persistent caste-based violence and exploitation in contemporary times reflects the “internal coloniality” of Indian society.