Abstract
Public health ethics is gaining recognition as a vital topic for public health education. The subject was highlighted in a Delphi survey of future priorities of member schools of The Association of Schools of Public Health in the European Region (ASPHER). We conducted a survey of teaching public health ethics in Bachelors and Masters of Public Health programmes targeting all 82 ASPHER member schools in 2010/2011, as an initiative toward improving ethics education in European Schools of Public Health. An eight-items questionnaire collected information on teaching of ethics in public health. A 52 percent response rate (43/82) revealed that nearly all of the responding schools (40 or 95% of the respondents with valid data) included the teaching of ethics in at least one of its programmes. They also expressed the need for support, (e.g., a model curriculum (n=25), case studies (n=24)), which indicates an area for further work to be met by the ASPHER Working Group on Ethics and Values in Public Health. This survey will help guide development of this topic as a teaching priority in public health education in Europe.
Highlights
Public health (PH) professionals and policy makers are often confronted with difficult ethical questions that require them to make decisions
‘Other’ forms of support included online courses in PH ethics. This screening survey successfully provides a first look at how and to what extent ethics is included in PH education in the European Region, taking ASPHER member SPHs as a sample
The findings of this study revealed that ethics content is highly valued by ASPHER SPH members as almost all (95%) include it in some form within their PH programmes
Summary
Public health (PH) professionals and policy makers are often confronted with difficult ethical questions that require them to make decisions. Whether they should limit individual autonomy in order to promote the greater good of a population.[1] While ethics content has been clearly addressed in medicine (mainly bioethics centred), this has not been the case in PH.[2] Yet, scholarly efforts to define what are the ethics (as academic and professional tools) that distinctively belong to PH are not scarce. This paper reports on the first findings of the ethics education survey in European SPHs
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