Public health policy, practice, and research entail numerous ethical challenges. How should one decide what the right thing to do is? This course will equip participants with the tools, skills, and know-how that are necessary to assess and deal with ethical challenges.
Imagine you had a vaccine that, if given to one million children, can prevent 11,000 hospitalizations and 2,500 severe cases of disease, but that will also cause 1,000 hospitalizations and 500 severe cases of diseases in children who would not otherwise have fallen ill. Would you initiate a widespread vaccination program in a disease-endemic region? Is it ethical to give the armed gang in your community money so they let medical supplies go through? Should you accept funding from a popular fast food company when developing a campaign to fight obesity? What criteria should you use to allocate a private donation of 10 million dollars that the donor has given to you to address a problem related to “global health”?
Public health policy, practice, and research entail numerous ethical challenges. How should one decide what the right thing to do is? This course will equip participants with the tools, skills, and know-how that are necessary to assess and deal with ethical challenges that may arise in high, middle and low income countries. We will discuss real-life cases from participant's experiences, explore ethical approaches, and engage in ethical deliberations to find ethically-justifiable solutions.
By the end of the course, participants will:
There are no prerequisites for this course. Bring your own experience, the ethical challenges you have faced in your work, and a desire to discuss them in group to assess the ethical dimensions and explore ethically justifiable solutions.
The course is highly interactive. Each session is designed to engage you and encourage you to discuss your own experiences, moral intuitions, judgments, and values through discussion of cases, deliberation exercises, participant presentations, invited speakers’ talks, and simulations.
Course evaluation will be based on:
At least one facilitator will be on-site in Lugano, and some may join online. Participants are welcomed to join either on-site in Lugano, or online. In case of a change of regional policies (e.g., Covid) or personal reasons, the course could change to online.