Showing posts with label health policy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label health policy. Show all posts

Thursday, 12 November 2020

Take sustainability serious in healthcare to avoid harming future patients!

 



In a brand new blog post at the BMJ Journal of Medical Ethics blog, me, Davide Fumagalli and Erik Malmqvist write about a severe ethical challenge for healthcare systems that arises due to structural deficiencies in established systems for healthcare resource allocation: 

 Most countries with publicly funded healthcare systems have ethically informed priority setting schemes to decide how to allocate scarce resources. Established principles in such schemes recognise patients’ need of care, the effects of interventions, and background requirements of equal consideration and cost-effectiveness. However, the typical use of such schemes is alarmingly short-sighted, systematically allowing the future resource base of healthcare to be undermined. In short: our way of helping current patients is systematically exposing future patients to serious harm and risk.

As a remedy, we propose that a sustainability principle is added to estableshed ethical framworks that govern this central aspect of health policy. Read more about the challenge, as well as our proposal over at the JME blog!



 

Sunday, 9 October 2016

New article online: Conscientious Refusal in Healthcare: The Swedish Solution




Indeed, as flagged before, I have a new article published online in the Journal of Medical Ethics on the topic of the Sweden's longstanding policy on conscientious objection by health professionals. I briefly describe the policy and its background and chart some recent challenges to it.

The published article, which is to be included in a coming special issue on conscientious objection, is here.

Preprints for free reading and download those of you who lack institutional access to the JME are here and here.

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Tuesday, 30 August 2016

Consensus statement on conscientious objection in healthcare

  

  
http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2016/08/consensus-statement-on-conscientious-objection-in-healthcare/

Just a very brief pointer to this post at the Oxford Practical Ethics blog, showcasing a consensus statement on how states and health systems should handle the phenomenon of healthcare staff conscientiously objecting to practices included in medical practice that comes out of the symposium on this very topic that I related in a recent post.

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Saturday, 22 March 2014

Now Online: Special Symposium of Public Health Ethics: New Media, Risky Behaviour and Children



All good to those who wait, it's said, and in this case this certainly holds up to scrutiny...



Yesterday afternoon, a special symposium in this year's first issue of the journal Public Health Ethics, guest-edited by myself and my colleague Karl Persson de Fine Licht, on the topic of New Media, Risky Behaviour and Children, went online after about 2 years of work, starting with this call for papers. In addition, the call came out of a preceding European project, running 2011-12, taking off as an original idea at a workshop we held in Gothenburg in October 2011. We are, of course, mighty grateful to the PHE editors-in-chief duo of Angus Dawson and Marcel Verweij, who accepted our proposal, remained committed to it and has offered all support needed under way.

The full table of content looks like this:

Introduction 
Christian Munthe and Karl Persson de Fine Licht
Editorial: New Media and Risky Behavior of Children and Young People: Ethics and Policy Implications. Introducing the Themes and Pushing for More 

Original articles
Julika Loss, Verena Lindacher, and Janina Curbach
Do Social Networking Sites Enhance the Attractiveness of Risky Health Behavior? Impression Management in Adolescents’ Communication on Facebook and its Ethical Implications

Joakim Forsemalm
Consolidated Youth Jury: Alcohol Prevention for Young People from Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern. A Swedish Case Report
  
K. P. Mehta, J. Coveney, P. Ward, and E. Handsley
Parents’ and Children’s Perceptions of the Ethics of Marketing Energy-Dense Nutrient-Poor Foods on the Internet: Implications for Policy to Restrict Children’s Exposure 

Boudewijn de Bruin
Alcohol in the Media and Young People: What Do We Need for Liberal Policy-making?

Case Discussion  
Kate L. Mandeville, Matthew Harris, H. Lucy Thomas, Yimmy Chow, and Claude Seng 
Using Social Networking Sites for Communicable Disease Control: Innovative Contact Tracing or Breach of Confidentiality?

Jasper Littmann and Anthony Kessel 
Accounting for the Costs of Contact Tracing through Social Networks  

André Krom 
From Facebook to Tracebook: A Justified Means to Prevent Infection Risks? 

Mart L. Stein, Babette O. Rump, Mirjam E. E. Kretzschmar, and Jim E. van Steenbergen 
Social Networking Sites as a Tool for Contact Tracing: Urge for Ethical Framework for Normative Guidance

David M. Shaw 
Communicating About Communicable Diseases on Facebook: Whisper, Don’t Shout  

Thomas Ploug and Søren Holm 
Take Not a Musket to Kill a Butterfly—Ensuring the Proportionality of Measures Used in Disease Control on the Internet

Now, I would myself very much have preferred to have the entire issue open access, for anyone to probe, but since that would cost about €1500 / article, and there are 11 articles in the symposium, there was no financially feasible way of managing this. One of the contributions is open access, due to it having been written in a context where funding for that objective has been available, but this is normally not the case for ethicists, social scientists and practitioners – unlike our more wealthy cousins within clinical and laboratory health science, I might add.

For access, your best bet is through a university library, a student or staff at a university with access, or you can try contacting individual authors and/or look around for so-called postprints posted in public archives.