Teaching seven principles for public health ethics: towards a curriculum for a short course on ethics in public health programmes

Abstract

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.

Ethics of Infection Control Measures for Carriers of Antimicrobial Drug–Resistant Organisms

“…Various public health ethics frameworks to guide decision-making have been suggested in this trade-off ( 24 , 36 – 38 ). Those frameworks have in common that they, explicitly or implicitly, call for clarity about the goals of a program and evaluation of effectiveness and proportionality.…”

Ethical considerations for the design and implementation of child injury prevention interventions: the example of delivering and installing safety equipment into the home

“…We applied a public health ethical framework10 to an intervention to promote child safety in the home. In this section we describe the example intervention followed by a presentation of the public health ethical framework.…”

“…Several frameworks for public health ethics exist;16 we chose to apply the seven ethical principles that are proposed for the field of public health ethics by Schröder-Bäck et al 10. The seven ethical principles highlight core values of public health that could be at stake when selecting an intervention for implementation.…”

Ethics education in public health: where are we now and where are we going?

“…The framework consists of seven mid-level principles: the four wellknown biomedical ethics principles (beneficence, non-maleficence, respect for autonomy and justice) (Beauchamp and Childress 2012) adapted for the public health context, and three additional principles (health maximization, proportionality and efficiency). The approach was also specifically developed to facilitate the introduction of ethics teaching into crowded public health curricula, requiring only five to eight hours of in-person teaching (Schröder-Bäck et al 2014).…”

“…Offering ethics training in the context of limited resources and a busy curricula that focuses on technical skills is another important barrier (Callahan and Jennings 2002;Coughlin 2009;Kessel 2003;Schröder-Bäck et al 2014). Limited resources can include lack of teaching materials for PHE (or lack of awareness of existing materials), lack of financial or sustained institutional support for the development of ethics training, and a lack of adequately trained educators.…”