BACKGROUND Informing lay citizens about complex health-related issues and their related ethical, legal, and social aspects (ELSA) is one important component of democratic health care/research governance. Public information activities may be especially valuable when they are used in multi-staged processes that also include elements of information and deliberation. OBJECTIVES This paper present...

BACKGROUND Since the Helsinki Declaration was introduced in 1964 as a code of practice for clinical research, it has generally been agreed that research governance is also needed in the field of public health and health promotion research. Recently, a range of factors led to the development of more stringent bureaucratic procedures, governing the conduct of low-risk population-based health rese...

As a result of increased interest in global health, more and more medical students and trainees from the 'developed world' are working and studying in the 'developing world'. However, while opportunities to do this important work increase, there has been insufficient development of ethical guidelines for students. It is often assumed that ethics training in developed world situations is applica...

Whilst public health interventions, and ethical consideration of them, have a long history, concern about ethical issues in public health first came to the fore in the 1980s in response to the rise of HIV/ AIDS. Since that time this has been a rapidly growing field of enquiry and work on public health ethics has been carried out by public health professionals, bioethicists and lawyers, among ot...

Recent disclosures of failures of care in the National Health Service (NHS) in England have led to debates about compassion deficits disallowing health professionals to provide high quality responsive care. While the link between high quality care and compassion is often taken for granted, it is less obvious how compassion – often originating in the individual’s emotional response – can become ...

Curriculum development in masters of public health programs that effectively meets the complex ethical challenges of the 21st century is an important part of public health education and requires ethical reasoning and purposively thinking. Current master programs in Public Health do not regularly include modules in public health ethics. The aim of this paper is to present background and theoreti...

Professional practice in health care inevitably involves difficult ethical considerations that are often embedded in universal events: birth, periods of ill health, and death. Clinicians may be unsure in these situations about what exactly they should do. In light of this circumstance, ethics should no longer be an implicit component of Australian health care, but instead be explicitly recognis...

BACKGROUND Disasters may lead to ethical challenges that are different from usual medical practices. In addition, disaster situations are related with public health ethics more than medical ethics, and accordingly may require stronger effort to achieve a balance between individual and collective rights. This paper aims to review some ethical dilemmas that arise in disasters and mainly focuses o...