Analysis of clinical trial agreement and insurance policy submitted to the ethics committee of a tertiary care teaching institute in central India.

Purpose: Very few studies conducted in India have analyzed insurance policies and clinical trial agreement (CTA) submitted to ethics committee (EC). This study was conducted to review and find out deficiencies in it.

Materials and methods: This was a retrospective observational study. All the protocols for regulatory clinical trials and academic research sponsored by the Indian Council of Medical Research or other funding agency were included. Insurance documents and CTA submitted with the study protocols were analyzed.

Results: A total of seventy CTA and insurance policies were analyzed. CTA mentioned that parties involved in 60 (86%) forms, scope of the agreement in 15 (21%) forms, responsibilities of the party in 68 (97%) forms, and payment details in 58 (83%) forms. Nearly 88.5% of the insurance policies mentioned whether the policy covers the participants for injury due to all clauses and 91% of the policies mentioned the validity period of insurance.

Conclusion: It was found that both the documents contained almost all the required elements. This was probably because this institutional EC insisted on and thoroughly reviewed the documents to ensure that adequate compensation of research-related injuries has been provided for and this fact is informed to the trial subject. As very few studies are available in the literature, we could not compare majority of the findings of this study with others.