Variability in public health ethics education across Europe.

Beschreibung: Introduction: Public health professionals face decisions that have far-reaching ethical implications. Despite this, the field of public health ethics is relatively new, and teaching and training in ethics for public health professionals is “highly variable in quantity and content” (Doudenkova et al. 2017). Building on a prior body of research, surveys of ASPHER and EUPHA members were undertaken to explore current levels of ethics education. Methods: Online surveys were distributed to ASPHER and EUPHA members with the aims of a) exploring the current status of ethics education in public health courses in ASPHER institutions and b) understanding the ethics education of individual public health practitioners in EUPHA. The ASPHER survey was completed by teaching staff at 35 different institutions between June and August 2019, whilst the EUPHA survey was completed by 230 professionals between October 2019 and December 2019. Results: Of the 31 ASPHER institutions with at least one master’s degree, 39% (n=12) had one or more master’s degree in which no ethics was taught, whilst only 47% (n=13) of institutions had someone who was formally qualified to teach ethics by virtue of holding a PhD, master’s and/or further academic role in ethics. Fifty-one percent (n=118) of EUPHA respondents had not received any ethics education or training in the past five years, and 21% (n=48) had never had any education or training in ethics. Discussion: Key messages from these surveys are that 1) ethics is an optional extra for some Schools of Public Health, 2) there is an ethics training gap in continuing professional development, 3) public health ethics education is a poorly defined field, 4) there is a lack of ethics expertise and support, but 5) public health professionals perceive they have a good understanding of, and response to ethical dilemmas in their professional lives. Conclusion: To ensure ethically reflective and sensitive public health practitioners, access to ethics education should be available to all public health professionals.

Schlagworte:Ethics, education, Europe, survey

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