Ethical Challenges in Modern Health Care

This course provides students with ethical and philosophical tools to evaluate contemporary and emerging ethical challenges in modern health care and preventative health. These modern challenges occur both at the interpersonal level (e.g. practitioner-patient relations) and at broader levels (e.g. communities and populations).

Modern health care and delivery is beginning to recognise the importance of more integrated or systems-based approaches to health. This more integrated approach to health was urged by the 2010 Lancet Commission report, Health professionals for a new century. That report also highlighted new infectious, environmental, and behavioural causes of poor health and the need for greater contextual understanding rather than a narrow technical health focus.

This course reflects some of this emphasis. Because it addresses and compares health care at both the interpersonal and the population levels, it will be relevant to students interested in public and practitioner-patient health care, in synergies between those approaches, and in interprofessional teamwork that can overcome disciplinary silos.

Examples of current challenges that may be covered in the course include the ethics of: preventative healthcare and health promotion; health nudging; domestic and international health advocacy; Ethical issues at the beginning and end of life, resource allocation; global justice and vulnerability.

To allow students to address these current and emerging issues, the course introduces them to relevant core ethical theories/approaches such as consequentialism, deontology, virtue ethics, the four principles approach; and to ethical concepts/principles such as beneficence, non-maleficence, respect for autonomy, justice, proportionality, necessity, patient-centred care, human dignity, and rights.

The course teaches and encourages critical ethical thinking about cutting-edge health issues using hot-topic questions in health to enable students to ethically evaluate and develop strategies for addressing current and emerging health challenges at various levels of health care and prevention.