Training Work Package

The Training work package, which is located at Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Center (KCMC) in Moshi, Tanzania, coordinates training and mentoring activities of EACCR, especially those of cross-cutting nature. It focuses on facilitating and supervising of short-term and long-term training for promising scientists, grants managers/officers, clinical trial monitors, data managers and ICT officers, among other personnel in Eastern Africa and beyond. Short-term training includes intensive training workshops/seminars, mentorship attachments and electronic-based learning modules in essential research principles, types of health research, biostatistics, Good Clinical Practices (GCP), Good Laboratory Practices (GLP), clinical trial monitoring and disease-specific techniques. Long-term training includes Masters degree fellowships (both full-time and online/distance programmes), post-graduate diplomas and Senior fellowships (mostly postdoctoral) in clinical trials, epidemiology and medical statistics, basic sciences and molecular techniques. Supervision of PhD fellowships is underway and their sponsorship is in the planning stage once funding opportunities are identified. Human resource development for research and health remains one of the critical areas for capacity-strengthening in this region in order to groom more researchers and grant management personnel to replace the ageing senior colleagues for sustainability.

e-Learning Centre

The aim of this area of the EACCR website is to provide clinical study investigators and clinical study staff with ‘how-to’ training on designing, planning, operationalising and reporting clinical studies. We deliberately say ‘study’ rather than ‘trial’ as these courses apply to most types of clinical research studies – including clinical trials.

Our e-learning short courses are designed to cover every step, process, and issue, that needs to be understood in order to conduct a high quality clinical study. These courses should take about 45 minutes to complete and a certificate is issued on completion. Every course is written to be globally applicable, so for all diseases and all regions. They are also highly pragmatic and adaptable. Each course is carefully researched to provide up to date and high quality material that is peer reviewed and regularly reviewed and updated.

These courses are built through the joint support and partnership of the European and Developing countries Clinical Trials Partnership-EDCTP (www.edctp.org) Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the World-Wide Antimalarial Resistance Network (www.wwarn.org) and Global Health Trials (www.globalhealthtrials.org) and EACCR.

Available short courses:

Modular Courses:

For all modular courses, a pass mark of 80% across all modules is required for certification.

1. Basic Malaria Microsopy

2. Research Ethics Online Training

3. Essential Elements of Ethics

We will continue to extend this list of courses so tell us if you need to learn about something that you do not see listed here. Please also get in touch if you currently teach a course that we have not listed. All of our courses are continuously updated and are peer reviewed. Therefore please do let us know if you have comments or remarks as we can incorporate these into the courses.

Further e-learning courses can be developed from your taught training courses. Please get in touch and we can build a course using your training material for which you will be fully acknowledged as author. This will raise the profile of your work whilst enabling your training to benefit far more people.

Coming soon:

Clinical Research Organisation and Management
Good Clinical Laboratory Practice
Introduction to Ethics
Reviewing Social Science
Cluster Randomized Trials
Introduction to Laboratory Research Practice

Further e-learning courses can be developed from your taught training courses. Please get in touch and we can build a course using your training material for which you will be fully acknowledge as author. This will raise the profile of your work whilst enabling your training to benefit far more people.

Other e-Learning resources:

Below are links to other e-learning resources that are available free online. We recommend these resources as they help to support and enhance clinical research. Although many are disease specific their content is often adaptable.

1. NIH clinical research training online. This training is freely available online and is very comprehensive. However, it is focussed to clinical trials in the United States and so may not be applicable in all regions:

http://www.cc.nih.gov/training /training/crt.html

2. African Malaria Network offers two free courses, introduction to research ethics and an introduction to Good Clinical Practice:

http://www.amanet-trust.org/files/elearning.html

3. Society for Clinical Research has some links to training slides and training resources. We have not reviewed these for quality but their users provide comments:

http://www.clinicalresearchsociety.org/free-clinical-research-training/

4. Pharma School has some free training content:

http://www.pharmaschool.co/

5. John Hopkins University make some courses freely available online. They do have a focus on HIV:

http://www.ccghe.jhmi.edu/CCG/distance/HIV_Courses/

6. USAID have a Global Health eLearning Centre giving online training on specific disease topics:

http://www.globalhealthlearning.org/login.cfm

7. This is a free online course on statistics for clinical trials:

http://onlinestatbook.com/index.html

8. John Hopkins Bloomburg School of Public Health offer these free online disease-related courses:

http://ocw.jhsph.edu/

9. The California STD/HIV Prevention Centre offers some free courses specifically around the topic of HIV and STDS, including case studies:

www.stdhivtraining.org/online_courses.html

Please tell us if you know of any free online courses or access to training materials that are available and we have not listed them here. info@globalhealthtrials.org