Newsletter 8 – November 12, 2012
Dear Participants, Partners, and Collaborators,
I would, first and foremost, like to thank all those of you who took the time to answer our on-line survey. As a publicly funded initiative, TRREE is committed to meeting its declared goals as well as to evolving in light of participants’ needs. Your input is valuable in both of these regards. Indeed, with over 300 responses received (10% response rate), we are able to extrapolate that an overwhelming majority of persons who completed TRREE modules found them informative and useful in your professional or learning activities. Many of you also return to the TRREE website for consultation purposes, for example, to review answers provided to certain cases or issues or to verify references. And to this end a printable pdf version of modules would be useful. We also received the message that communication about new features on the site need to be improved to ensure participants get full benefit of TRREE. Be certain that we are working on this.
In November, I travelled to visit National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan. We explored building partnerships and making TRREE accessible in Chinese. Hopefully we will have some good news about the concrete outcome of those discussions as early as the beginning of 2013.
Shortly, I will also visit South Africa, to participate at the WMA workshop on the revision of the Declaration of Helsinki with support of the Swiss Medical Association. I hope to meet some of you at this venue.
Early in 2013, a group of experts will be meeting at the Brocher Foundation in Geneva to address the issue of standards for training in research ethics. We are looking forward to meeting our colleagues also involved in on-line ethics training and to crystallizing training standards.
Last but not least, in a few weeks, a new module on Good clinical practice will go on-line in its English, French and German versions. The GCP module adds a second thematic module (module 3.2 GCP) to the already existing module on informed consent (module 3.1 Informed consent). The TRREE GCP module is a recognized training program for investigators who conduct clinical trials by Swissmedic (the Swiss Drug Agency). In Nigeria, the National Health Research Committee has also acknowledged TRREE training for its ethics committee members and investigators and in South Africa it is a prerequisite for anyone wishing to attend SARETI.
Recent statistics demonstrate that with its more than 3’600 registered participants, TRREE is well on its way to meeting one of its initial goals: providing research ethics training to all Sub-Saharan countries.
TRREE has participants from almost all African countries and the number of participants has significantly increased in countries where National Supplements have been developed. New National Supplements are regularly added with the Burka Faso and South African modules forthcoming. We welcome all proposals for partnerships to develop National Supplements for more countries worldwide.
As I write these few words, work on a new module on Vaccine Trials is ongoing in South Africa. This will allow a broader access to the unique expertise developed in South Africa for vaccine trials in the area of HIV/AIDS.
As always, I urge you all to continue to promote TRREE among all stakeholders, especially in the medical and healthcare professional schools and universities. To facilitate this process the certification process has been modified to include a validation procedure as suggested by several of you. My dream continues to be that all of us manage to introduce TRREE in the education programme at least in one institution and that we have participating universities in each country.
We look forward to continuing the development of TRREE with our Partners and collaborators, both new and old!
Best, Cordialement,
Dominique SprumontCoordinateur TRREE Coordinator