The Philippine Council for Health Research and Development (PCHRD), thru the Regional Health Research and Development Consortium implemented the Regional Research Fund (RRF) to encourage and support the conduct of health research in the local level. Thru the RRF, young researchers are given the chance to develop and conduct their studies with the help of the RHRDC Technical Review Board (TRB) members who evaluates the technical aspects of the projects. In 2015, the PCHRD conducted a series of technical review training workshops in the different clusters of RHRDCs whereby the participants requested for a manual of operations for the TRB of the different consortia, thus, the creation of the TRB Manual of Operations. This manual was released on August 2018 during the PNHRS Week Celebration. The MOP hoped to simplify and standardize the TRB operations across the 16 consortia in the country.
Further, On December 2 – 3, 2019, the Region 1 Health Research and Development Consortium (R1HRDC)
TRB in cooperation with the R1HRDC Capacity Building Committee and PCHRD conducted the first ever training in the country for TRB Members using the standardized MOP entitled “Training/Workshop on Research Paper Critiquing” with Dr. Ofelia Saniel as the resource speaker and facilitator. Participants were from the TRB members of the 3 DOH retained hospitals in Region 1. They started the training by a short lecture on the process of evaluation, introducing the MOP and the forms needed. The group was divided and sub-groups were assigned different research proposals to review by identifying the specific parts they found to be weak/ problematic. They also focused on critiquing the major parts of research proposals such as identifying the research problem, objectives, significance, review of related literature, conceptual framework, research design, analysis, and utilization. A total of 4 plenary sessions were conducted after each workshop. Participants were also required to discuss the results of their review and their observations along with their recommendations on how to enhance/ improve the proposal to be worthy of funding and utilization.
Lastly, Ms. Carina Rebulanan, Chief IDD of PCHRD, advised the panel that the idea of conducting the workshop came from the region, hence it is in R1HRDC that the workshop was piloted together with the resource speaker Dr. Saniel. She added that the result of the 2day workshop will be presented to PCHRD and shall be conducted throughout the country after polishing the flow of the training. In response, Dr. Jose B. Orosa III, R1HRDC TRB Chair and one of the authors of the TRB MOP, suggested that since operations will be standardized, TRBs must be accredited to ensure the quality of each institutions’ process of reviewing and to identify the maturity and level of their capacity. Ms. Rebulanan positively accepted the suggestion and said that she will be looking forward to its attainment.
