Earlier this year, during the Philippine National Health Research System (PNHRS)-Capacity Building Committee (CBC) meeting, one of the identified initiatives that the committee should undertake is the development of standard training materials. Thus, the Philippine Council for Health Research and Development (PCHRD) in cooperation with Symmetrix Research Consultancy Co., through its project leader Dr. Ophelia Mendoza, conducted a regional consultative meeting in developing standardized training modules for the Basic Research Methods (BRM) course last September 4-5, 2018 at the Golden Prince Hotel, Cebu City.

The consultative meeting was attended by the chairs/members of the Capacity Building Committee (CBC) and Research Management Committee (RMC) with the consortium coordinator/project staff of all the Regional Health Research and Development Consortium (RHRDC) in the country. The objectives of the regional consultation were: (1) to share experiences of RHRDCs in the conduct of the BRM course; (2) to elicit suggestions from the RHRDCs regarding various aspects of the standardized modules like the scope/content, training design and selection and training of trainers at the regional level; and (3) to identify and address potential issues that will be met with the use of the standardized module. The meeting also became the platform for productive exchange of information and open discussion to address the lack of standardized modules on BRM course which can be used by the RHDCs for their training activities.

The 2-day meeting consisted of regional presentations with an open forum, presentation of results of the inventory of existing training materials used by RHDCs, group work with presentation of outputs, discussions of outputs and synthesis of result of the regional consultation. The meeting ended successfully and this will surely benefit every member institutions.