Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic (“the pandemic”) has magnified the critical importance of public policy deliberation in public health emergency circumstances when normal health care operations are disrupted, and crisis conditions prevail. Adopting the lens of syndemic theory, the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on vulnerable older adults suggests that the pandemic has heightened pre-existing precarities and racial inequities across diverse older adult populations, underlining the urgency of needed policy reforms. While the pandemic has called attention to systemic failures in U.S. public health emergency planning at both federal and state levels of government, the important role of civil society in influencing policy decision making and advocating for legal and ethics reforms and social change in a democracy calls for more open dialogue in aging, public health and legal communities and constituencies. To foster this dialogue, one public health lawyer, who is also a bioethicist and gerontological social work researcher and served as chair of the New York State Bar Association Health Law Section COVID Task Force in 2020 (“Task Force”), shares her first-person perspectives on the process of leading the development of a statewide bar's recommendations for policy reforms, including the challenges and conflicts encountered. A hospital-based attorney and clinical bioethicist brings a clinical ethics perspective to the discussions. This first-person contribution discusses the power of constituencies to influence policy deliberation in a democracy, and the implications of the Task Force recommendations for future aging and public health policy, particularly in view of the high suffering burdens and trauma older persons and older people of color have borne during the pandemic.
Highlights
The unprecedented magnitude and impact of the COVID-19 pandemic across diverse communities in the United States have foregrounded the critical role of civil society in processes of policy deliberation shaping aging and public health policy, especially in public health emergency circumstances when normal health care operations have been disrupted and crisis conditions prevail
Informed by these first-person perspectives, this contribution discusses the implications of the Task Force recommendations for future aging and public health policy, in view of the high suffering burdens and trauma older persons and older people of color have borne during the pandemic
In addition to the specific recommendations made in the New York State Bar Association Report and Resolutions [7, 13], reflections by two public health law attorneys and bioethicists on the ground in New York during the pandemic provide first-person perspectives on the challenges that were faced in the course of intensive work over many months to build support across diverse constituencies for a plan of action to address the urgent needs of communities
Summary
While the pandemic has called attention to systemic failures in U.S public health emergency planning at both federal and state levels of government, the important role of civil society in influencing policy decision making and advocating for legal and ethics reforms and social change in a democracy calls for more open dialogue in aging, public health and legal communities and constituencies. To foster this dialogue, one public health lawyer, who is a bioethicist and gerontological social work researcher and served as chair of the New York State Bar Association Health Law Section COVID Task Force in 2020 (“Task Force”), shares her first-person perspectives on the process of leading the development of a statewide bar’s recommendations for policy reforms, including the challenges and conflicts encountered.
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