Synthesis and summary

How can we perceive and address ethical challenges in public health practice and policy? One way is by using ethical concepts to inform our thinking. One does not have to be a specialist in ethics to do so. This document is part of a series of papers intended to introduce practitioners to some values, principles, theories and approaches that are important in public health ethics.

In this paper we will outline the concept of reciprocity as it may be applied in the ethics of public health. The goal of this paper is to present the concept as it has been developed and used in the literature.

“The social determinants of health are the circumstances in which people are born,grow up, live, work and age, and the systems put in place to deal with illness. These circumstances are in turn shaped by a wider set of forces: economics, social policies, and politics” (World Health Organization’s Commission on Social Determinants of Health [CSDH WHO], 2016).

“The underlying social…

This document is intended to enable public health actors to more easily distinguish between the most widespread policy approaches that have been proposed to reduce health inequalities. The approaches that we will discuss are:

• Political economy,
• Macro social policies,
• Intersectionality,
• Life course approach,
• Settings approach,
…

Intersectionality is a way to think about and act upon social inequality and discrimination. It offers a promising approach to these issues within public policy and within public health. This briefing note briefly explains intersectionality and explores the potential of an intersectional approach to reducing health inequalities.¹

Work in the field of public health has…

In this second¹ of three briefing notes² on public health ethics, we provide an overview of various philosophical and theoretical perspectives that have informed the development, evolution, and application of public health ethics throughout its short history. We believe it is important for public health practitioners to understand these ideas because they inform, either…

This paper provides a very short summary of a longer paper of the same name. The longer work, including full references, is available online at:
http://www.ncchpp.ca/docs/2014_Ethique_Reciprocity_En.pdf.

Whether considered as a value or formulated as a principle to guide actions, reciprocity is commonly appealed to in public health to help ensure that certain obligations due to…

Decision making in healthy public policy,¹ as in all policy areas, increasingly involves taking economic efficiency into consideration. Efficiency is the extent to which sought-after benefits can be obtained for the lowest possible cost, and the tools that measure it are economic evaluations. Efficiency is, however, but one of the many possible criteria according to which policy…

The first document in this series of briefing notes began with the observation that public health practitioners often struggle with ethical decisions in their practice but may not have relevant tools and resources to deal with these challenges. An assumption underlying this third paper is that by providing public health practitioners and decision makers with some guidance about practical…

The intent of this briefing note is to introduce some tools developed in recent years to facilitate the integration of health issues into the decision-making processes of sectors whose primary concern is not population health. It is not the product of a comprehensive review of the various support instruments for health-related decision making, but rather a review of tools associated with the…