Sino-American Medical Ethics Forum

On March 21st, the “2013 China-US Medical Ethical Forum” co-sponsored by Xiangya Medical College of Central South University, Third Xiangya Hospital, and Yale-China Association of America was successfully held at the Third Xiangya Hospital. Professor Kaveh Khoshnood (School of Public Health, Yale University),Professor Madelon Baranoski,(Yale University Medical School), Tian Yongquan(Vice President of Central South University), Yao Yaomei(Director of Drug Registration Department, Hunan Food and Drug Administration), Yu Zhiming(Director of Foreign Affairs Department, Central South University) ,and the Third Xiangya Hospital leaders:Luo Aijing, Chen Fangping and Yuan Hong took part in.

Chen Fangping(the president of the Third Xiangya Hospital) gave a welcome speech. He pointed out that the Third Xiangya Hospital is a young national team deployed the hospital and has a short time to build a hospital, but has always attached great importance to ethics. We have three independent ethics committees - Medical Ethics Committee, Transplantation Ethics Committee, and Animal Ethics Committee. The year before last, we also received the national GCP platform project. We believe that the convening of this forum will certainly have a very significant significance in promoting the study of medical ethics in China.

Afterwards, Associate Professors Kaveh Khoshnood and Yao Yaomei gave speeches respectively.

Tian Yongquan, vice president of Central South University, delivered an important speech. He said that the convening of the Sino-American Medical Ethics Forum in 2013 was a major event in the development of ethics in our school. As the main force of the national medical research and clinical services, Xiangya has also taken the lead in the field of ethics research and practice. As early as in 2000, the Ethics Committee was established and registered internationally. In recent years, more work has been done in the areas of ethical review of new drug clinical research, ethical counseling and review of assisted reproductive technologies, and ethical assessment of parental transplant cases. In particular, the Third Xiangya Hospital, despite the history of the establishment of the hospital is not long, but all the work in the medical ethics has done very well, we established a number of norms, standard operating procedures, and achieved some recognized results. However, judging from the exchanges at home and abroad, we still have a big gap with the international advanced level. In 2011, based on years of cooperation with Yale University, we have successfully declared a major international cooperation project--“Research Ethics Training and Curriculum Development Program with China”-- funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) under the strong support of the Yale-China Association. The purpose is to establish a large-scale international cooperation research platform for the systematic and comprehensive training of medical ethical talents and educational curricula for schools. Through the hard work our school and medical ethics research scholars at Yale University worked together to build a research team, develop Multi-disciplinary integration of research projects,and the establishment of long-term cooperation, ultimately my school was built into a domestic medical ethics research and training center. Beginning in 2011, Xiangya and Yale's cooperative team will extensively discuss the status quo and future of Xiangya medical ethics, the current status of medical ethics committees, the development of socialist behavior ethics, the status of GCP and hospital ethics committees, ethical issues in clinical pharmacology, and teacher candidates, cooperation plans. It is believed that through the exchanges at the forum, through the in-depth explanation of the experts from home and abroad, we will enter a new stage in Xiangya's ethics research and practice.

During the forum, Madelon Baranoski gave "Children and Other Vulnerable Groups" and "Community Research Ethical Difficulty: What Do Researchers Need to Do?" separately on the theme, and group discussions and interactions with field personnel were taken.