Ethical principles and ethical issues in public health

Public health ethics considers moral dimensions of public health practice and research. While medical ethics dates back hundreds of years, and bioethics writings emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, ‘public health ethics’, articulated as such, did not appear significantly in the literature for several more decades. There has been great interest recently in defining public health ethics, examining how it resembles or differs from medical ethics or bioethics, outlining frameworks and codes, and providing conceptual and practical guidance on how ethics can inform public health practice and research. This chapter describes the emergence of public health ethics; work in bioethics with relevance for public health; the relevance of social justice theory in addressing public health problems; and discusses literature on ethics and public health research, including whether public health research ethics might differ from ethical guidance for other human research. The chapter concludes with an overview of ethics issues related to genetic research and emerging technologies.

Virtue and Care Ethics & Humanism in Medical Education: A Scoping Review

PURPOSE:This scoping review explores how virtue and care ethics are incorporated into health professions education and how these factors may relate to the development of humanistic patient care.METHOD:Our team identified citations in the literature emphasizing virtue ethics and care ethics (in PubMed, NLM Catalog, WorldCat, EthicsShare, EthxWeb, Globethics.net, Philosopher’s Index, and ProQuest Central) lending themselves to constructs of humanism curricula. Our exclusion criteria consisted of non-English articles, those not addressing virtue and care ethics and humanism in medical pedagogy, and those not addressing aspects of character in health ethics. We examined in a stepwise fashion whether citations: 1) Contained definitions of virtue and care ethics; 2) Implemented virtue and care ethics in health care curricula; and 3) Evidenced patient-directed caregiver humanism.RESULTS: 811 citations were identified, 88 intensively reviewed, and the final 25 analyzed in-depth. We identified multiple key themes with relevant metaphors associated with virtue/care ethics, curricula, and humanism education.CONCLUSIONS:This research sought to better understand how virtue and care ethics can potentially promote humanism and identified themes that facilitate and impede this mission.