Social and Cultural Insights into Healthy Aging: A Qualitative Study from the South Indian City of Bengaluru, India.

Background: Qualitative methods through lived experience narratives provide relevant sociocultural insights into healthy aging.

Objectives: The aim of this qualitative study was to explore social and cultural perceptions of healthy aging from older adults (OAs), their next of kin, and those involved in providing services to OAs in Bengaluru, India.

Materials And Methods: We conducted in-depth interviews with 28 participants, all purposefully selected based on specific inclusion criteria, to get as varied a sample as possible.

Urgent need for planetary health education for healthcare professionals and students in India.

The current climate crisis has had a significant negative impact on human health across the globe including India. Climate change is leading to global heating, rising sea levels and more severe extreme weather events such as floods, cyclones and droughts. These events have direct and indirect detrimental impacts on human health such as increased risk of water-related illnesses, vector-borne diseases, malnutrition due to food insecurity and pollution-related poor health.

Understanding the Challenges of Intensive Care Staff in Communicating With Patients and Patients' Families During the COVID-19 Crisis: A Qualitative Exploration.

Background Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) isolation protocols in India restricted family members of COVID-19 patients from visiting them in hospitals and in intensive care units, especially during the peak of the pandemic. This along with the elaborate personal protective equipment (PPE) created challenges for intensivists and nurses in COVID ICUs in effectively communicating with patients and patients' families, especially in shared decision-making processes. Methods This article is the outcome of a qualitative study using in-depth one-on-one interviews with 10 intensivists and four intensive care nurses in two teaching hospitals in Bengaluru, South India.

Respecting values and perspectives in biobanking and genetic research governance: Outcomes of a qualitative study in Bengaluru, India.

The promise of biobanking and genetic research (BGR) in the context of translational research towards improving public health and personalised medicine has been recognised in India. Worldwide experience has shown that incorporating stakeholders' expectations and values into the governance of BGR is essential to address ethical aspects of BGR.  This paper draws on engagement with various stakeholders in the South Indian city of Bengaluru to understand how incorporating people's values and beliefs can inform policy making decisions and strengthen BGR governance within India.

Perceptions of healthcare providers and mothers on management and care of severely wasted children: a qualitative study in Karnataka, India.

Objectives: To explore perceptions of healthcare providers and mothers of children with severe wasting on the perceived reasons for severe wasting, constraints on the management and barriers to caregiving and care-seeking practices.

Design: In-depth qualitative interviews conducted with healthcare providers and mothers of children with severe wasting.

Setting: Urban and rural locations in Karnataka state, India.

Perceptions about controlled human infection model (CHIM) studies among members of ethics committees of Indian medical institutions: A qualitative exploration.

Controlled Human Infection Model (CHIM) studies provide a unique platform for studying the pathophysiology of infectious diseases and accelerated testing of vaccines and drugs in controlled settings. However, ethical issues shroud them as the disease-causing pathogen is intentionally inoculated into healthy consenting volunteers, and effective treatment may or may not be available. We explored the perceptions of the members of institutional ethics committees (IECs) in India about CHIM studies.

A Qualitative Study of Traditional Bone Setters in South India: A Case Series.

Introduction: There are approximately 60,000 Traditional Bone Setters (TBS) in India, who have no formal education or training in modern medicine but treat approximately 60% of bone related trauma. This study investigated the history of TBS, why they are so popular, and their methods.

Methods: From a list of TBS from four states in South India, a purposive and convenience sampling method identified participants.

The Covid-19 effect on medical students' perceptions of their profession: A mixed methods study from South India.

Covid-19 has devastated human lives and stretched the limits of the medical profession and health systems. Using the mixed methods of online survey and online focus group discussions, we assessed how medical students and interns of two medical colleges in South India viewed the profession they had chosen. Of the 900 participants, 571(63.

Between paternalism and illegality: a longitudinal analysis of the role and condition of manual scavengers in India.

Manual scavengers, or 'Safai Karamcharis', as they are known in India, are sanitation workers who manually clean human waste for a living and face considerable occupational health risks. They are subject to deep-seated, caste-based stigma associated with their perceived 'caste impurity' and lack of cleanliness, which result both in consistently dangerous substandard working conditions and lack of social mobility, with women facing greater hardships. The COVID-19 pandemic has further exacerbated their plight.

Reflective narratives during the Covid-19 pandemic: an outlet for medical students in uncertain times.

Reflective narratives on personal experiences, observations, thoughts and concerns were used as a method of helping medical students process the Covid-19 pandemic and their lives. This involved individual writing, anonymous submission, on-line group reading of selected narratives on a voluntary basis and facilitated discussions. Students felt that this was a safe method to voice their feelings and thoughts, to understand themselves better and to gain new perspectives.

Engagement and social acceptance in genome editing for human benefit: Reflections on research and practice in a global context.

While there are both practical and ethical reasons for public engagement in science and innovation, real-world detailed examples of engagement practice and the lessons to come from these are still hard to find. This paper showcases three contextually diverse case studies of engagement practice. Case 1 recounts the experiences of a government-funded initiative to involve scientists and policy makers as science communicators for the purpose of engaging the Argentine public on gene editing.

'Life after Death - the Dead shall Teach the Living': a Qualitative Study on the Motivations and Expectations of Body Donors, their Families, and Religious Scholars in the South Indian City of Bangalore.

In India, there has been a shift from using unclaimed bodies to voluntary body donation for anatomy dissections in medical colleges. This study used in-depth qualitative interviews to explore the deeper intent, values and attitudes towards body donation, the body and death, and expectations of the body donor ( = 12), as well as their next of kin ( = 7) and representative religious scholars ( = 12). All donors had enrolled in a body bequest programme in a medical school in South India.

Engaging publics in biobanking and genetic research governance - a literature review towards informing practice in India.

There is growing interest in advancing biobanking and genetic research in many countries, including India. Concurrently, more importance is being placed on participatory approaches involving the public and other stakeholders in addressing ethical issues and policymaking as part of a broader governance approach. We analyse the tools, purposes, outcomes and limitations of engaging people towards biobanking and genetic research governance that have been undertaken worldwide, and explore their relevance to India.

Public perceptions on Controlled Human Infection Model (CHIM) studies-a qualitative pilot study from South India.

Research using Controlled Human Infection Models is yet to be attempted in India. This study was conducted to understand the perceptions of the lay public and key opinion makers prior to the possible introduction of such studies in the country. 110 respondents from urban and rural Bangalore district were interviewed using qualitative research methods of Focus Group Discussions and In-depth Interviews.

The making of a "Citizen Doctor": How effective are value-based classes?

In 2018, the Division of Health and Humanities at St John's Research Institute introduced the "Citizen Doctor" course for first year medical students at St. John's Medical College. The focus was to expose future doctors to the wider framework of health and invoke a sense of citizenship, responsiveness, and critical thinking.

The Eternal Grove - A garden of remembrance.

The Health and Humanities division, St John's Medical College, together with the student-led environment body Ecologics, initiated the plan to have a garden space dedicated to the remembrance of those who have donated their bodies to medical education.

The Parallel Arts Festival at the 14th World Congress of Bioethics and the 7th National Bioethics Conference, Bengaluru.

The theme of the 14th World Congress of Bioethics (WCB) was "Health for All in an Unequal World; Obligations of Global Bioethics". The Parallel Arts Festival was embedded within the programme of the Congress and curated to reflect its theme.

Consultation on the feasibility and ethics of specific, probable Controlled Human Infection Model study scenarios in India: A report.

On March 6, 2019, a workshop was held as part of a larger public consultation exercise to evaluate the perceptions of participants from diverse backgrounds of studies involving Controlled Human Infection Models (CHIMs) (1,2) in India, through three specific case scenarios. This workshop was organised by the Health and Humanities Division of the St. John's Research Institute, Bangalore with funding from the Translational Health Science and Technology Institute (TSHTI), Faridabad (www.

Public engagement in the context of a CHIM study.

Public engagement especially in new and contested areas of medical research is an essential ethical requirement. It helps to build trust, to embed ethical discourse in public beliefs and values and widen the accountability and the governance of biomedical research. Historically, ethical codes resulted from public protest following unethical medical research practices.

Health for all in an unequal world: Obligations of global bioethics.

The theme of the joint 14th World Congress of Bioethics and 7th National Bioethics Conference Congress "Health for all in an unequal world: Obligations of global bioethics" is of critical relevance in the present global context. Although the world is better off in terms of improved health status of people by many measures than before, there exist colossal gaps across and within populations. Much needs to be done to respond to the lack of access to healthcare, poor quality of living and working conditions, and deteriorating quality of overall environment which affects more adversely the already deprived.

On the integration of Ethics into the Physiology curriculum.

A one-day state-level workshop was organised in Karnataka to share the experience of a programme implemented earlier, in 2015-16, at St John's Medical College, Bengaluru that integrated the teaching of ethics into the physiology curriculum. The aim was to develop the programme further, list the challenges likely to be faced while scaling it up, and identify other colleges which could participate in the scaling up. Twenty-eight participants, representing 13 medical colleges, and five resource persons attended the workshop.

"Thinking ethics": a novel, pilot, proof-of-concept program of integrating ethics into the Physiology curriculum in South India.

Integrating medical ethics into the physiology teaching-learning program has been largely unexplored in India. The objective of this exercise was to introduce an interactive and integrated ethics program into the Physiology course of first-year medical students and to evaluate their perceptions. Sixty medical students (30 men, 30 women) underwent 11 sessions over a 7-mo period.

The views of ethics committee members and medical researchers on the return of individual research results and incidental findings, ownership issues and benefit sharing in biobanking research in a South Indian city.

The return of individual research results and incidental findings from biobanking research is a much debated ethical issue globally but has extensive relevance in India where the burden of out of pocket health care expenses is high for the majority. The views of 21 ethics committee (EC) members and 22 researchers from Bengaluru, India, concerning the ethics of biobanking research were sought through in-depth interviews using an unfolding case vignette with probes. A shared view among most was that individual research results which are 'actionable' or have 'clinical significance' should be returned to the sample contributors through their treating physicians.

The ethics of research on stored biological samples: outcomes of a Workshop.

Research is often conducted using laboratory samples and data. The ethical issues that arise in a study involving residual samples are considerably different from those arising in a prospective study. Some of these ethical issues concern the risks to confidentiality, individual autonomy, trust in and credibility of the researcher or the research, commercialisation and even the nomenclature involved.

Perceptions of stigma among medical and nursing students and tuberculosis and diabetes patients at a teaching hospital in southern India.

Stigma has a significant impact on the diagnosis of a variety of illnesses, patients' compliance with treatment and their recovery from these diseases. However, the Indian medical and nursing curriculum has given relatively little attention to recognising and addressing the issue of stigma. This study compared the perception of stigma with respect to tuberculosis (TB) and diabetes mellitus (DM) among medical and nursing students to that among patients with these diseases.