Ethical Issues in COVID-19 Communication to Mitigate the Pandemic: Dilemmas and Practical Implications.

Communication plays a critical role in all stages of a pandemic. From the moment it is officially declared governments and public health organizations aim to inform the public about the risk from the disease and to encourage people to adopt mitigation practices. The purpose of this article is to call attention to the multiple types and the complexity of ethical challenges in COVID-19 communication. Different types of ethical issues in COVID-19 communication are presented in four main sections. The first deals with ethical issues in informing the public about the risk of the pandemic and dilemmas regarding communicating uncertainty, using threats and scare tactics, and framing the pandemic as a war. The second concerns unintended consequences that relate to increasing inequities, stigmatization, ageism, and delaying medical care. The third raises ethical issues in communicating about specific mitigation practices: contact tracing, wearing face masks, spatial (also referred to as social) distancing, and handwashing or sanitizing. The fourth concerns appealing to positive social values associated with solidarity and personal responsibility, and ethical challenges when using these appeals. The article concludes with a list of practical implications and the importance of identifying ethical concerns, which necessitate interdisciplinary knowledge, cross-disciplinary collaborations, public discourse and advocacy.

Restarting Orthopaedic Care in a Pandemic: Ethical Framework and Case Examples.

The question about how to resume typical orthopaedic care during a pandemic, such as coronavirus disease 2019, should be framed not only as a logistic or safety question but also as an ethical question. The current published guidelines from surgical societies do not explicitly address ethical dilemmas, such as why public health ethics requires a cessation of nonemergency surgery or how to fairly allocate limited resources for delayed surgical care. We propose ethical guidance for the resumption of care on the basis of public health ethics with a focus on clinical equipoise, triage tiers, and flexibility. We then provide orthopaedic surgery examples to guide physicians in the ethical resumption of care.

Ethical Challenges in Health Care Policy during COVID-19 Pandemic in Italy.

Since the outbreak of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, Italy has proven to be one of the countries with the highest coronavirus-linked death rate. To reduce the impact of SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, the Italian Government decision-makers issued a series of law decrees that imposed measures limiting social contacts, stopped non-essential production activities, and restructured public health care in order to privilege assistance to patients infected with SARS-CoV-2. Health care services were substantially limited including planned hospitalization and elective surgeries. These substantial measures were criticized due to their impact on individual rights including freedom and autonomy, but were justified by the awareness that hospitals would have been unable to cope with the surge of infected people who needed treatment for COVID-19. The imbalance between the need to guarantee ordinary care and to deal with the pandemic, in a context of limited health resources, raises ethical concerns as well as clinical management issues. The emergency scenario caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, especially in the lockdown phase, led the Government and health care decision-makers to prioritize community safety above the individuals' rights. This new community-centered approach to clinical care has created tension among the practitioners and exposed health workers to malpractice claims. Reducing the morbidity and mortality rates of the COVID-19 pandemic is the priority of every government, but the legitimate question remains whether the policy that supports this measure could be less harmful for the health care system.

Implementação e avaliabilidade das intervenções em saúde: estudos de caso no Brasil / Implementation and evaluability of health interventions: case studies in Brazil

Por que recomendo a leitura deste livro? Tendo tido a oportunidade privilegiada de orientar os diversos capítulos, no âmbito do curso internacional de avaliação promovido pelo Conass, posso assegurar que as indicações nele contidas são aplicáveis para a avaliação de diferentes intervenções em saúde (políticas, programas, organizações, tratamentos e tecnologias), mas os modelos de avaliação propostos são suficientemente amplos e globais para serem utilizados em outros campos, tais como a educação, os serviços sociais ou a administração pública. O modelo geral de que trata o livro, desenvolvido há mais de duas décadas por um grupo de pesquisa interdisciplinar na Universidade de Montreal, foi testado com sucesso em pesquisas avaliativas realizadas não só no Canadá, mas também em países da Europa, da África e da América do Sul, especialmente no Brasil. De acordo com os autores, a avaliação é um procedimento interdisciplinar que pode e deve, muitas vezes, recorrer a métodos variados e complementares. Diferentes tipos de avaliação possíveis são discutidos nos capítulos do livro, cuja proposta é identificar consensos e fornecer um modelo integrador. Na confrontação entre os diversos tipos de modelo, o avaliador produz referenciais que tanto o auxiliarão na formulação de suas questões de avaliação quanto poderão ajudar o gestor a repensar a própria intervenção e seus pressupostos. A obra aborda, ainda, a avaliação normativa, atividade mediante a qual procura verificar se uma intervenção corresponde às expectativas, pois parte do processo de gestão é estreitamente associado ao controle dentro das organizações, e uma avaliação administrativa não recorre obrigatoriamente a um procedimento científico. Portanto, por seus métodos e finalidades, é uma atividade distinta da pesquisa avaliativa. Além disso, a coletânea de textos oferece uma reflexão sobre a institucionalização da avaliação e propõe marcos que possibilitem também avaliar e qualificar as avaliações. Dessa forma, o livro serve como fonte para a reflexão teórica, inspiração na formulação de projetos concretos de avaliação e no aperfeiçoamento dos programas e práticas de saúde.

Ethics education and moral decision-making in clinical commissioning: an interview study.

BACKGROUND: Clinical commissioning involves ethically challenging decisions about health resource allocation. However, commissioners come from a range of professional backgrounds with varying levels of training and expertise in ethical decision-making. Hence, they may lack the relevant training and resources to feel fully prepared for this increasingly demanding role. AIM: This study aims to provide insight into how prepared commissioners feel in making ethical decisions; what ethics learning needs they might have; and how these might be addressed. DESIGN AND SETTING: This qualitative interview study explored the experiences of commissioners working for clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) in England. METHOD: Eighteen participants were interviewed between December 2017 and July 2018 using a purposive sampling approach to participant selection. Transcriptions were coded and analysed using the constant comparative method of thematic analysis. RESULTS: Most participants had not received ethics training in preparation for, or during, their commissioning role, and reported difficulties identifying and analysing ethical issues. Participants often felt uncomfortable about decisions they were involved in, attributing this to a number of factors: a sense of moral unease; concerns that CCGs' decision-making processes were not sufficiently transparent; and that CCGs were not fully accountable to the population served. CONCLUSION: Commissioners face complex decisions involving ethical issues, and associated moral unease is exacerbated by a lack of ethics training and lack of confidence in identifying and analysing these. This study shows a clear need for additional support and ethics training for commissioners to support them in this area of decision-making.

From self-interest to solidarity: One path towards delivering refugee health.

The recent and ongoing refugee crisis in Europe highlights conflicting attitudes about the rights of migrants and refugees to health care in transition and destination countries. Some European and Scandinavian states, such as Germany and Sweden, have welcomed large numbers of migrants, while others, such as the U.K., have been significantly less open. In part, this is because of reluctance by certain national governments to incur what are seen as the high costs of delivering aid and care to migrants. In response to these assumptions, some theorists have argued that the appropriate way to view the health needs of migrants is not in terms of rights, but in terms of the interests of destination and transition countries-and have argued that providing care to migrants and refugees will generate benefits for their host countries. However, self-interest alone is less effective at motivating the provision of care for health deprivations that do not pose a threat to third parties, or to migrants and refugees in poor or distant countries. In this paper, I argue that while self-interest is unlikely in itself to motivate the provision of all necessary health care to all migrants and refugees, and may risk stigmatizing already vulnerable persons, it can provide the foundation upon which such motivations can be built. My goal is therefore to show how and why a more just approach to the provision of health care to migrants can and should be derived from narrower, self-interested commitments to preserving citizen health.

Discussing rights and wrongs: Three suggestions for moving forward with the migrant health rights debate.

Claims for improving migrants' access to care often draw on universalistic ethical notions, such as the principle of equity as it is specified in human rights law and public health ethics. These claims contrast with political realities across most welfare states. In the underlying public discourses, the frontline arguments against greater inclusion have often focused on practical concerns, such as the costs of healthcare provision. Yet it has also been suggested that ultimately context-specific moral frameworks play a key role in demarcating legitimate right-holders from undeserving others. Hence, is this a conflict between ethical principles and practical concerns? Or between different ethical perspectives? And why would that question matter? We propose that awareness of the nature of the arguments involved and respect for different ethical views are critical for coherent and constructive debates. This paper looks at the ways in which ethical concepts are used to justify exclusionary policy decisions. In particular, it examines the rationales that inform health policies towards documented and undocumented labor migrants in two welfare states, Germany and Israel, through the qualitative analysis of policy documents and 71 in-depth interviews. The study points to the central role of particular concepts of health-related deservingness. These results lead to the proposition that the fundamental clash in the discussion on migrants' access to care is one, albeit not solely, between contrasting ethical perspectives. Drawing on process-oriented approaches to ethical decision-making, the paper concludes with three suggestions for moving forward with the migrant health rights debate.

Language barriers and epistemic injustice in healthcare settings.

Contemporary realities of global population movement increasingly bring to the fore the challenge of quality and equitable health provision across language barriers. While this linguistic challenge is not unique to immigration contexts and is likewise shared by health systems responding to the needs of aboriginal peoples and other historical linguistic minorities, the expanding multilingual landscape of receiving societies renders this challenge even more critical, owing to limited or even non-existing familiarity of modern and often monolingual health systems with the particular needs of new linguistic minorities. The centrality of language to health beliefs, attitudes, practices, cultural scripts, and conceptual frameworks emphasizes its pivotal role in the healthcare process, and consequently in the adverse effects of treatment that is language-insensitive and unaware. Such an attitude on the part of medical authorities risks considerable epistemic injustice in the form of a (mis)judgement of patients' intelligence, credibility, and rationality based on the language that they speak and the manner in which they speak it, consequently impacting the quality and equity of care provided. This danger, I argue, may be effectively countered by fostering among the participants in the healthcare process a sense of epistemic humility through greater metalinguistic awareness. Outlining a range of operative steps that can be used to facilitate this. I argue that the reality of language barriers in the healthcare process, while not entirely eliminable, may nevertheless be successfully addressed, in order to mitigate the challenge of quality and equitable healthcare provision in multilingual societies.

Salus Populi, principio de no lucro y deber cívico de donar sangre / Salus Populi, prohibition of financial gain and the civic duty to donate blood

Este texto trata sobre la legislación española en materia de donación de sangre. Lo que nos proponemos en él es sostener que, dado que en nuestro país se prohíbe la donación remunerada de sangre pero se permite la importación de sangre y derivados de la misma, especialmente de plasma, proveniente de donaciones remuneradas, dicha legislación tiene problemas de coherencia. Paradójicamente, el establecimiento de un deber cívico de donar sangre sería más coherente con la legislación vigente, y con los principios que la inspiran, que la situación actual

This text focus on the Spanish regulation of Blood donation. Our aim is to defend that, given the fact that in our state paid blood donations are forbidden while the importation of blood and its products -especially plasma- coming from remunerated donations is permitted, the aforementioned legislation entails several consistency issues. Paradoxically, establishing a civic duty to donate blood would be more congruent with the legislation in force and its underlying principles than the present situation

Patient Advocacy Organizations, Industry Funding, and Conflicts of Interest.

Importance: Patient advocacy organizations (PAOs) are influential health care stakeholders that provide direct counseling and education for patients, engage in policy advocacy, and shape research agendas. Many PAOs report having financial relationships with for-profit industry, yet little is known about the nature of these relationships. Objective: To describe the nature of industry funding and partnerships between PAOs and for-profit companies in the United States. Design, Setting, and Participants: A survey was conducted from September 1, 2013, to June 30, 2014, of a nationally representative random sample of 439 PAO leaders, representing 5.6% of 7865 PAOs identified in the United States. Survey questions addressed the nature of their activities, their financial relationships with industry, and the perceived effectiveness of their conflict of interest policies. Main Outcomes and Measures: Amount and sources of revenue as well as organizational experiences with and policies regarding financial conflict of interest. Results: Of the 439 surveys mailed to PAO leaders, 289 (65.8%) were returned with at least 80% of the questions answered. The PAOs varied widely in terms of size, funding, activities, and disease focus. The median total revenue among responding organizations was $299 140 (interquartile range, $70 000-$1 200 000). A total of 165 of 245 PAOs (67.3%) reported receiving industry funding, with 19 of 160 PAOs (11.9%) receiving more than half of their funding from industry. Among the subset of PAOs that received industry funding, the median amount was $50 000 (interquartile range, $15 000-$200 000); the median proportion of industry support derived from the pharmaceutical, device, and/or biotechnology sectors was 45% (interquartile range, 0%-100%). A total of 220 of 269 respondents (81.8%) indicated that conflicts of interest are very or moderately relevant to PAOs, and 94 of 171 (55.0%) believed that their organizations' conflict of interest policies were very good. A total of 22 of 285 PAO leaders (7.7%) perceived pressure to conform their positions to the interests of corporate donors. Conclusions and Relevance: Patient advocacy organizations engage in wide-ranging health activities. Although most PAOs receive modest funding from industry, a minority receive substantial industry support, raising added concerns about independence. Many respondents report a need to improve their conflict of interest policies to help maintain public trust.

Mind the Scales: Harnessing Spatial Big Data for Infectious Disease Surveillance and Inference.

Spatial big data have the velocity, volume, and variety of big data sources and contain additional geographic information. Digital data sources, such as medical claims, mobile phone call data records, and geographically tagged tweets, have entered infectious diseases epidemiology as novel sources of data to complement traditional infectious disease surveillance. In this work, we provide examples of how spatial big data have been used thus far in epidemiological analyses and describe opportunities for these sources to improve disease-mitigation strategies and public health coordination. In addition, we consider the technical, practical, and ethical challenges with the use of spatial big data in infectious disease surveillance and inference. Finally, we discuss the implications of the rising use of spatial big data in epidemiology to health risk communication, and public health policy recommendations and coordination across scales.

Diabetes mellitus tipo 2 en adolescentes en una unidad de diabetes pediátrica / Type 2 diabetes mellitus in adolescents in a pediatric diabetes unit

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Revisión sistemática del papel que representan los profesionales de enfermería en las desigualdades sociales en salud entre la población inmigrante / Systematic review of nursing professional role in social health inequalities in the immigrant population

La situación actual de España ha causado un aumento de las desigualdades sociales en salud en la población. Los inmigrantes sin recursos económicos son el colectivo más vulnerable, con elevadas tasas de morbimortalidad. Por este motivo, se creó la Comisión sobre Determinantes Sociales de la Salud (CDSS) para paliar esta situación, la cual elaboró un marco conceptual capaz de clasificar los factores causantes de desigualdad y que permitiera diseñar acciones políticas para disminuir este problema. La colaboración de los profesionales de enfermería en la elaboración de políticas eficaces para reducir las desigualdades en salud sería un nuevo campo de acción de trabajo, ya que en esta profesión se obtienen conocimientos únicos de las personas a las que se prestan cuidados con problemática social. Uno de los principales problemas detectados por las enfermeras en la población inmigrante es el aislamiento social. En este texto se desarrolla uno de los diagnósticos de enfermería incluido en un plan de cuidados de una persona inmigrante con problemas de desigualdad social en salud (AU)

The current situation in Spain has led to increase social inequalities in health in the population. Immigrants without economic resources are the most vulnerable group with high rates of morbidity and mortality. For this reason, the Commission on Social Determinants of Health (CSDH) was created by developing a conceptual framework to classify the inequality factors, and thus, politically designing actions in order to reduce this problem. The nursing professional collaboration in developing effective policies to reduce health inequalities would be a new framework, because this profession possesses unique knowledge of people who are cared with social problem. One of the main problems identified by nurses in the immigrant population is social isolation, being developed in this text one of the nursing diagnoses included in a immigrant person care plan with social inequality in health (AU)