Executive Summary

Capacity building for Medical Education in Bioethics in India

“Capacity Building for Medical Education in Bioethics in India” addresses the need for an appropriate bioethics curriculum for undergraduate medical students in India. This 3-year project, which emphasizes faculty capacity development through peer-mentoring teams, aims to enhance bioethics teaching at the Christian Medical College (CMC), Vellore, India in collaboration with Tufts University (Tufts), Boston, USA. These institutions have a long history of successful collaboration, are at the forefront of medical education and research, are committed to mutual support and cooperation, and recognize the need for leadership in bioethics training within the medical curriculum in India and for global health elsewhere. Faculty teams of senior and junior faculty will create high-quality training content for issues in clinical and research bioethics, to be shared in training programs for medical students in India and global health students elsewhere. Workshops will focus on training of trainers, mentoring junior faculty to develop teaching modules, and capacity development in teaching bioethics. This project will result in a culturally appropriate, needs-based bioethics curriculum, which is developed in the first year and used, evaluated and refined in subsequent years at CMC, and in case studies in global health for use in teaching at Tufts, to enable CMC and Tufts to advance their mission of training ethically sensitive healthcare professionals who will uphold the values and ethos of both institutions in their professional practice. To that end, the goals of this project are as follows:

• To develop a bioethics training program within the undergraduate medical curriculum in India at CMC, leveraging the recently developed bioethics training program at Tufts, which, in turn, will be enriched by the inclusion of a more global perspective of health issues in resource limited settings.
• To promote capacity building at CMC and Tufts by training of faculty in teaching methods for ethical issues encountered in the practice of medicine in the hospital and the community in well-resourced and resource-poor settings.
• To develop, implement and evaluate a bioethics training program during the 4.5 year medical curriculum at CMC based on ethical issues relevant to Indian medical practice.
• To develop global health case studies for use in the Tufts bioethics training program.
• To serve as a resource Center for other medical schools in India in the process of developing bioethics training programs.