BackgroundTeaching ethics in public health programmes is not routine everywhere – at least not in most schools of public health in the European region. Yet empirical evidence shows that schools of public health are more and more interested in the integration of ethics in their curricula, since public health professionals often have to face difficult ethical decisions.DiscussionThe authors have developed and practiced an approach to how ethics can be taught even in crowded curricula, requiring five to eight hours of teaching and learning contact time. In this way, if programme curricula do not allow more time for ethics, students of public health can at least be sensitised to ethics and ethical argumentation. This approach – focusing on the application of seven mid-level principles to cases (non-maleficence, beneficence, health maximisation, efficiency, respect for autonomy, justice, proportionality) – is presented in this paper. Easy to use ‘tools’ applying ethics to public health are presented.SummaryThe crowded nature of the public health curriculum, and the nature of students participating in it, required us to devise and develop a short course, and to use techniques that were likely to provide a relatively efficient introduction to the processes, content and methods involved in the field of ethics.
IntroductionAutistic people may have different educational needs that need to be met to allow them to develop their full potential. Education and disability policies remain within the competence of EU Member States, with current educational standards and provisions for autistic people implemented locally. This scoping review aims to map EU and national special education policies with the goal of scoping the level of fulfilment of the right to education of autistic people.MethodsFour EU countries (United Kingdom, France, Poland and Spain) were included in this scoping review study. Governmental policies in the field of education, special education needs and disability law were included. Path dependency framework was used for data analysis; a net of inter-dependencies between international, EU and national policies was created.Results and discussionEach country created policies where the right to free education without discrimination is provided. Poland does not have an autism specific strategy, whereas the United Kingdom, France and Spain have policies specifically designed for autistic individuals. Within the United Kingdom, all countries created different autism plans, nevertheless all aim to reach the same goal—inclusive education for autistic children that leads to the development of their full potential.ConclusionPolicy-making across Europe in the field of education has been changing through the years in favour of autistic people. Today their rights are noticed and considered, but there is still room for improvement. Results showed that approaches and policies vastly differ between countries, more Member States should be analysed in a similar manner to gain a broader and clearer view with a special focus on disability rights in Central and Eastern Europe.
To understand the French public's response to the 2009 pandemic A ⁄ H1N1 influenza health threat a sequence analysis framework has been employed mobilising different theoretical strands such as innovations diffusion theory, surprise theory and social representation theory. These tend to suggest that disease episodes, public health policy and the public's response should be considered within a larger socio-cognitive frame incorporating representations anchored by prior disease episodes and campaigns. It is suggested in this article that the public's response was greatly influenced by the pervasive anchoring of the social representations of the pandemic threat to the 1918 Spanish flu in the lay and scientific media. These representations were eventually seen not to match the reality of the disease and consequently the French public did not panic during the 2009 pandemic. This hypothesis has been tested empirically by examining retrospective media, bibliographical data and an analysis of risk perception carried out through three cross-sectional studies prior to and during the pandemic episode and one month after the launch of the vaccination campaign. These findings suggest that alarmist framings of health threats may be counterproductive since they may reduce the capacity of public health organisations to mobilise the public in the case of more serious emerging disease.Keywords: pandemic influenza, framing, representations, sequence analysis, panic IntroductionThis article focuses on the dynamics of risk representations and their potential impact on precautionary behaviour in relation to pandemic influenza among French adults. During the last decade pandemic influenza has received considerable attention from the scientific, political and lay communities worldwide. Prior to the emergence of so-called 'swine flu' in North America, the increasing magnitude of avian influenza outbreaks had raised the spectre of a new and potentially devastating influenza pandemic with consequences comparable to those of Spanish flu (1918)(1919). Major public concern was expressed that the current highly pathogenic avian influenza viruses might mutate into more highly infectious forms and acquire the ability of person to person transmission. Such concern was not surprising since pandemic influenza involved most of the properties that have been consistently found to contribute to large media coverage, strong institutional attention and high perceptions of risk (Renn and Rohrmann 2000, Slovic 2000). Indeed, the disease caused by an invisible, unfamiliar, communicable, potentially catastrophic, emerging infectious agent remains at least partly beyond individual and social control due to the extreme difficulty of detecting it before the first symptoms appear. In the spring of 2009 the spread of a novel A ⁄ H1N1 influenza virus triggered the worldwide implementation of mitigating responses planned by public health organisations. Roughly, two major phases may be identified: (i) in the absence of available vaccine, the public was st...
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.