by: Tiara Fadhilah (Member of SCORE CIMSA UGM batch 2020)
Clinical research is one of the healthcare sciences which focuses on improving valuable knowledge in many aspects. It explores human disease, promotes health, develops the preventions and treatments or medical devices to earn better care for the patients. The research emphasizes the important points, namely efficacy and safety. It means, all medications, treatments, medical devices, and diagnostic products supposed for human use must be efficient and safe. Clinical research has strict protocols, so not everyone can do this. It can only be performed in certain conditions and by competent persons or groups.
Clinical research is very important in clinical fields. It plays a main role in the development of many products to fight diseases. The importance of clinical research may be divided based on its types. There are several types of clinical research:
- Prevention research is done to identify potential methods of prevention, then there will be better ways to provide the best prevention for certain conditions. This research includes the development of medicines and vaccines.
- Screening research aims to detect disease more accurately. There will be new better methods to detect patients’ diseases.
- Diagnostic research is performed to identify the most effective ways to recognize the specific disorder of the patients.
- Treatment research is important to figure out new methods of intervention that could be possible options to treat diseases.
- Genetic studies will be able to find the correlations between genes and diseases. So, by looking at them, disease prediction can be improved.
- Epidemiological studies are significant to understand the pattern, control, and causes of diseases in a population.
The Standing Committee on Research Exchange (SCORE) is one of the standing committees in the Center for Indonesian Medical Students’ Activities (CIMSA) that has a mission to give the opportunities of experiencing research for future physicians. Besides, SCORE also facilitates all medical students to do research exchanges around the world, so that each student may experience research in another country, look for the answer of their curiosity, and deepen their knowledge about their favorite topics. These missions will be able to trigger future physicians to be more critical in exploring clinical research. They will be aware of issues happening around them and they will try to figure it out by doing research.
This means, there will be more new excellent breakthroughs, especially in the healthcare system, found by these young researchers. Therefore, the world of healthcare will be developed quickly and able to make many people’s lives easier. The skill of the future physicians also will be greatly improved. Having many skilled researchers is good for the development of the world.