JEDDAH — Roche Products Saudi Arabia LLC, in collaboration with the Vienna School of Clinical Research, has recently hosted a 6-day workshop to deliver Good Clinical Practice (GCP) in partnership with King Fahad Specialist Hospital, Dammam, Saudi Arabia, King Abdul-Aziz Medical City Jeddah, and King Fahad Medical City, Riyadh. The content of the program focuses on developing the capabilities to help increase the research outputs and outcomes of researchers, individually and collectively.
Roche Products Saudi Arabia LLC is committed to invest and develop clinical research capabilities in the Kingdom to ensure that innovation reaches the Saudi patients adequately and utilize the strong infrastructure and platform in key research centers of the Kingdom. Roche Products Saudi Arabia LLC realizes the value of such workshops to be further involved in international clinical trials and achieves comparable results with other countries.
Dr Hani Al-Hashmi, Consultant, Adult Medical Oncology/Hematology and bone marrow transplantation, King Fahad Specialist Hospital, Dammam, Saudi Arabia, said “we strongly believe in partnership and collaboration. The success of this meeting will promote our educational, training and research agenda. We have discussed previously the needs in the region and with such wonderful collaboration we could expect great future.”
He added that the workshops were organized “to raise the level of knowledge and research awareness as well as activities in the region.
The gathering would also be beneficial to various stakeholders in the medical field not only for their daily practices but also for building research and long lasting networks, he pointed out.
Prof. Heinrich Klech, who is the Managing Director of Vienna School of Clinical Research, added that the workshops are equally rewarding to Investigators, clinical scientists, regulatory personnel in government and industry, CRAs from pharma or CROs, industry physicians in R&D, industry physicians in medical affairs, study nurses, study coordinators, and IRB members.
The workshops were done in those strategic cities to familiarize researchers with the structure and content of regulations and guidelines prevailing in clinical trials, said Dr Mona Aldabbagh, Section Head, Research Training & Development at King Abdul-Aziz Medical City, Jeddah.
She explained that the workshops will “help researchers attain tools to provide easy referencing of regulations and guidelines for good clinical practice, and provide guidance to researchers in order to apply these regulations and guidelines to real‐life situations.”
Moreover, she added that the periodic assessments attained though these workshops assure keeping researchers up-to-date with “all new rules related to subject’s safety and confidentiality of their information.”
Programs of this nature can only be successfully sustained and successful if there are “champions in the country who see the opportunity to improve and upgrade their organizations by training and continuous learning of their staff,” Prof. Heinrich Klech remarked.
He revealed that in Saudi Arabia, strategic plans are in place to promote clinical trials (CTs) in the Kingdom.
Highlighting the importance of these trials to foster advancement in the field of research related to human subjects, Prof. Heinrich Klech said clinical trials improve the standard of care of any clinical organization. They are the “entrance door to international cooperation, access to publication, etc.,” he said.
He further said “CTs are fostering research capabilities and investments in organizations and infrastructure. It needs some sort of a public campaign or information about the value of CTs within the population building on examples from other countries - this is important to build up the understanding of the public in order to comply with the culture in your country.” — SG
