Lecture on online course for capacity building and evidence by Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, Director General of ICMR

We don’t need to over emphasize the fact that in today’s age evidence based practice of evidence based medicine is very important. This course really goes in to the process and methods that are necessary to evaluate the research materials and data that available out there. All of us are exposed to the power of the internet and all the search engines we have today to lot of data and information. So we have to be able to assess the quality of this data, we need to be able to make sense out of it, we need to able to evaluate it, and then finally we need to be able to synthesize the many different bits of evidence out there to come to some kind of generalized conclusion on a particular topic. So the ICMR has been supporting this work in area of developing guidelines, using research to inform evidence based policy for a number of years and one of the activities that we supported is Centre for Evidence Based Medicine at the PGIMER, Chandigarh with satellite centers at the R.P Medical Govt. College, Tanda and NEIGHRIMS, Shilong in Meghalaya. Over the last five years these centers have done a commendable job of training large number of people. Over five hundred people have been trained and the trainees have come out with over twenty systematic reviews in various aspects of child health. These particular centers focused on evidence based medicine for child health.

Now, the next stage is really trying to expand the reach of this course by going online. So this is an experiment to see whether an online course which consist of different kinds of teaching modules including video recordings of lectures. It is the first with offline mentorship opportunities and continued interaction with mentors at the PGIMER, Chandigarh that could actually resulting this and reaching large number of people. The ICMR is also investing heavily in online training programs National Institute of Epidemiology in Chennai has been running a couple of courses on research methodology and bio-ethics. But, we hope to be able to add several new courses in the next few months and years. So we hope that there were we have to take this work spread and all the training materials that have been developed could be used by Many more people across the country and that we can build up enough man power strength in this particular area in order to bring more evidence, more rationality and more scientific thinking into the way we practices clinical medicine.