Healthy Policy Ethics

Health Policy Ethics is a new and emerging field. It focuses on the importance of policy in setting the overarching principles that shape the experience of health care at the bedside and in the community. In Canada, health policy ethics is concerned specifically with the ethical foundations of Canadian medicine; justice and equity implications of health reform strategies; issues across the full continuum of health and health care; and the reform and revitalization of public health.

The Department of Bioethics embraces the notion that policy making and research into policy development are moral enterprises. As insightfully described by Ruth Malone: "policy... has an irreducibly moral dimension insofar as it involves a decision about how to act toward affected others who are not involved".

Dr. Nuala Kenny's present funded research includes: clarifying the nature of values and ethical frameworks in health policy documents;, assessing the strategies for meaningful citizen engagement in health care;, analyzing health care priority-setting in a sample of international countries; and evaluating Canadian home care policies for the inclusion of issues relevant to pediatric populations and inter-generational justice. Dr. Kenny is working in the area of public health ethics with particular attention to pandemic planning, issues of social justice and new work at the interface of physician ethics, and just sustainable health care.

Dr. Jeff Kirby's current health policy research is in the creation and evaluation of innovative, socially-just approaches to meso-level policy development in large health care organizations. It includes the development, and research-based evaluation, of values- and evidence-informed decision making frameworks for national health care delivery organizations and provincial Departments of Health.