Community Health: Week 02 GRN: Ethics in Health Promotion

What fundamental ethical principles are grounded in the Code of Ethics?

1) Value of Life

2) Promoting Justice

3) Ensuring beneficence

4) Avoiding Harm

T/F: Health Education specialists openly communicate to colleagues, employers, and professional organizations whey they suspect unethical practices that violate the profession’s Code of Ethics.

True

I should involve other groups and stakeholders in my work when convenient for me.

False

Health Education Specialists support the dev’mt of professional standards grounded in

theory, research, and practice.

Broadly speaking, public health ethics helps guide practical decisions affecting

or health based on scientific evidence and in accordance      

with accepted and of and

population

community

values

standards

right

wrong

Name the 10 essential public health services

1)     Assess and monitor population health status, factors that influence health, and community needs and assets

2)     Investigate, diagnose, and address health problems and hazards affecting the population

3)     Communicate effectively to inform and educate people about health, factors that influence it, and how to improve it

4)     Strengthen, support, and mobilize communities and partnerships to improve health

5)     Create, champion, and implement policies, plans, and laws that impact health

6)     Utilize legal and regulatory actions designed to improve and protect the public's health

7)     Assure an effective system that enables equitable access to the individual services and care needed to be healthy

8)     Build and support a diverse and skilled public health workforce

9)     Improve and innovate public health functions through ongoing evaluation, research, and continuous quality improvement

10)  Build and maintain a strong organizational infrastructure for public health

A community is, to emphasize again, neither a statistical abstraction nor a mere aggregate of individuals but rather a network of relationships and emotional bonds between people sharing a life in common organized through a political and moral order. The value that best reflects this fundamental, relational character of social

life is . (pg 8)

solidarity

What are some examples of social determinants of health?

Poverty, lack of education, discrimination against particular social groups

When do ethical challenges typically arise?

Ethical challenges usually arise “in unusual or extreme situations where standards are not yet in place, are changing, or are competing. These situations include emergency operations, foreign cultural settings, emergent fields with innovative interventions, or periods of severe budget constraints that force prioritization of programs. In such challenging situations where no value consensus exists or where evidence does not point to a single course of action, public health ethics provides a process to determine and justify a course of action.”

agent-centered ethical theory

Aristotle’s agent-centered theory focuses on the agent’s ability to make choices and choose the moral decision based off of their own free will and virtues such as honesty, courage, etc.

Deontology

• has to do with a sense of making the choice that is most morally correct as a result of a sense of duty to a set of pre-laid out rules on how to act, that they impose on themselves.  It’s free will acting within a set of bounds that direct the person to do good

Utilitarianism

• considers ethically best that course of action that will result in the greatest net benefits over harms

Name three differences between clinical and public health ethics.

Clinical ethics focuses on “medical interventions by clinical professionals,” “respect for individual patients,” and “informed consent sought from an individual patient for specific medical interventions.”

In contrast, public health ethics focuses on “range of interventions by various professionals,” “relational autonomy of interdependent citizens,” and “community consent and building a social consensus through ongoing dialogue and collaboration with the public.”

Summarize the three-step approach to public health decision making. Use a public health ethical dilemma to demonstrate the process.

1)     Analyze the ethical dimensions of the Public Health Issue and Context

a.      Summary: weigh the harms of an issue, laws and morals related to the issue, and the goals of public health in that context

Ex. weighing the ethical dimensions of the legality of abortion

2)     Formulate alternative courses of action and evaluate their ethical dimensions

a.      Consider all the various options and their repercussions, analyze them using the various ethic theories listed above (agent-centered, etc.)

Ex. Banning abortion vs maintaining its legality

3)     Provide justification for a particular public health decision

a.      Consider the public health decision’s effectiveness, proportionality, necessity, least infringement, and public justification

Ex. justifying abortion for concerns for the woman’s health

T/F: Many people use the terms ethics and morals interchangeably

True

Do public health ethical issues arise across all essential public health services? Why?

Teacher said: Public health ethics address the entire spectrum of ethical issues that arise in any area of public health practice