New Perspectives on Paternalism and Health Care

Schramme, Thomas

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-17960-5

Cited by 9 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 122 publications

(242 reference statements)

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“…Indeed, the flourishing and important field of public health ethics has brought much-needed attention to specific ethical concerns in public health. [22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30] On the one hand, some authors have emphasized that the main generation of evidence is not just epidemiology but population health science, which is simultaneously broader than epidemiology (since it may include studies from the social sciences and/or the life sciences) and also has a more specific focus, namely the health of populations. On the other hand, in public health ethics, we are specifically concerned with normative questions that arise at group level (rather than individual action).…”

Section: Knowledge Action and Valuesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Navigating complex trade‐offs in public health interventions

Russo

Hirsch

2023

Evaluation Clinical Practice

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Public health, just as any policy‐related field, faces the evergreen problem of turning knowledge into action. Among other problems, there is a clash between the inherent complexity of public health problems and the inevitable push, by decision‐makers and the public, to simplify them. The Covid‐19 pandemic has shown the insufficiencies of our current epistemological, methodological and normative apparatus to handle such crises in a timely manner. Despite this, several authors have been arguing for the importance of engaging global crises such as Covid‐19 in ways that do not oversimplify key dimensions of the issues involved. In this paper, we contribute to this emerging scholarship. Building on existing work in the field of environmental problem‐solving, we propose an integrative approach to navigating complex trade‐offs in public health interventions. Briefly put, we propose that decision making should be informed by an analysis of any given problem from four distinct, but interrelated, lenses: (i) values and valuation, (ii) process and governance, (iii) power and inequalities and (iv) scientific evidence, methods and concepts. This normative framework, we argue, can help with spelling out the complexity of public health problems and with spelling out the rationale behind public health decision making to non‐specialists and the general public. We illustrate our approach using the controversy over wearing face masks in the Covid‐19 pandemic.

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