Ethics workshops-are they effective in improving the competencies of faculty and postgraduates?

Responsible conduct of research requires a good knowledge about research ethics. With the recent changes in the clinical trial regulations and the proposed introduction of ethics in medical curriculum by the Medical Council of India, there is an urgent need to train the medical faculty and postgraduates in research ethics.

We wanted to measure the effectiveness of a one day program which was organized using didactic lectures and case scenarios on the knowledge, attitude and skills on ethics among faculty and postgraduates. This was done using a retropre questionnaire. We performed a Kolmogorov Smirnov test to measure the normality, Mann Whitney U-test to test the difference in scores between faculty and postgraduates and a Wilcoxin signed rank test to measure the prepost scores.

The faculty showed better scores in knowledge and attitude (p<0.05) when compared to postgraduates both before and after the workshop. The overall scores for both faculty and postgraduates had increased after the workshop (p<0.05).

This re-emphasizes the need for introduction of ethics training during undergraduate course and also the fact that even a short training program in research ethics could be effective.