What are three ethical justifications for NOT conducting patient notifications during an disease outbreak (e.g. syringe reuse between patients/provider to patient)

 

Answer.

Public health surveillance by necessity occurs without explicit patient consent. There is a strong legal and scientific support for maintaining name based reporting of infectious diseases and other types of public health surveillance. For examination of ethical justification for conducting surveillance without patient consent must meet characteristics of public health surveillance system in order to meet the ethical standards context of contemporary public health ethics frameworks.

• The ethical dilemma.

the ethical justification for public health surveillance without explicit patient consent presents itself as a challenge intersection of principles of clinical and public health ethics. The competing ethical priorities are the health care providers responsibility to protect patient confidentiality and the public health authority responsibility to use the information to improve population health. The right to keep ones health data private is an exercise of ones autonomy, a sort of informational privacy, which is emphasized in clinical encounters.

• Biomedical Ethics.

Contemporary biomedical ethics operates in large part by the practical application of four principles considered in the relationship between the health care provider and the individual patient. These four principles autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence and justice. Although not without serious critics, principle based approaches remain the mainstay of clinical bioethics.

• Public Health Ethics.

The field public health ethics began in the earnest in the early 2000s with the recognition that the conceptual resources for clinical ethics are inadequate for dealing with issues in public health practice. In clinical ethics, the focus is on resolving moral dilemmas involving health care providers and their individual patients. In public health, where the focus is population and community well being, the community rather than the individual is the patient.