ethics in population health
When responding to your peers, highlight any existing connections between the ethical issue you identified and the issues identified in your peers’ posts. Do you believe the strategies they proposed for avoiding or resolving the issues could be impactful? Respectfully agree or disagree. What strategies or actions can you propose for avoiding or resolving the ethical issues identified by your peers?
Post # 1
Deborah Umanzor
This week our discussion is regarding ethics in population health, I have chosen to discuss the elderly. The elderly are considered a vulnerable population for which advocacy and protective policies are needed. The older adult population is growing, Holtz (2017) states, “older adults are among the fastest growing age group”(p.43). The World Health Organization (WHO) lists ageing as one of the ethical issues to be addressed at the March 2017 WHO meeting in Germany. The WHO describes several ethical considerations in their report “Developing an Ethical Framework for Healthy Ageing”. The report defines older people as “a person whose age has passed the average life expectancy at birth for that country” (WHO Report, 2017, p.13).
The report speaks to the growth of the ageing population and the need for policy and advocacy to ensure that this growing and ageing population maintain healthy productive lives while also maintaining dignity and freedom from age discrimination or abuse. The goals set forth in this report are 1.) Create living environments that support the older adult’s lifestyle and physical needs 2.) Live as healthy a life as possible well into advanced years which will change the focus of health care from curative to preventative to continuing care of chronic disease 3.) Provide support to keep elders at home and out of health care facilities whenever possible.
The question of rationing health care services due to the extreme costs was discussed and the determination was made that all individuals, regardless of age have an inherent right to health care services and costs can be cut in other ways. I agree that it should be the individual’s right to decide the extent of medical care that they want for themselves. I believe it is unethical to put a price on a person’s life regardless of what others may feel is or is not a good quality of life.
The question of how to increase elder’s participation in clinical research was discussed. Elders with multiple chronic diseases are often ineligible for clinical trials as the data becomes flawed. I have worked as a clinical trial coordinator and most of the drug companies that sponsored the trials welcomed patients with multiple co-morbidities but there was usually an upper age limit of 80 years of age. In my experience, some 80 year olds would have been very good research subjects.
