The webinar, co-presented by the NCCHPP and the National Collaborating Centre for Methods and Tools, featured a case involving a program that a public health unit is expected to support but whose effectiveness is not supported by evidence. This webinar was offered on February 21, 2017.

Our goal was to explore the issues related to program-level decision making in situations where there are many available options, with diverse target populations, effects, evidential support as well as proponents backing them. This range of choices unfolds in a decision-making context in which one cannot focus on everything and must make difficult choices about how to allocate limited resources. After discussing such decision-making from the perspective of a public health unit, we used an ethics framework in order to guide ethical deliberation in which participants could:

  • Identify ethical values and issues that are pertinent to the case,
  • Consider how some conflicts may arise between values,
  • Think about how to balance those conflicts in order to decide what needs to be done.

This webinar was intended to be of interest for public health practitioners, managers and decision makers as well as for a general audience.

Presenters

Dr. Megan Ward
Associate Medical Officer of Health, Region of Peel – Public Health.

Michael Keeling and Olivier Bellefleur
Research Officers, NCCHPP

Series of webinars on Public Health Ethics

This was the third in a series of webinars presented by the NCCHPP in collaboration with our colleagues at the NCCs for public health. This series focuses on combining evidence and ethics to improve decision making in diverse sectors of public health practice. Our goal is to help practitioners to incorporate ethical perspectives into their everyday practices, including longer-term decision-making, with webinars designed to be relevant for practitioners and decision makers in the various areas served by the different NCCs.

Webinar Recording

PPT Presentation
52 slides