Program and public policy

Integrated Impact Assessment (IIA) is a decision-support mechanism increasingly being considered by public administrations in industrialized countries. Integrated Impact Assessment (IIA) is a decision-support mechanism increasingly being considered by public administrations in industrialized countries. 

This briefing note is intended for all managers in the health and social services sectors, as well as for public health actors who would like to see this type of approach established within their government so that health can be better taken into account in all policies. Those who are called upon to manage programs, projects or public policies involving multiple sectors with a determinant impact on population health will find here an overview of the usefulness of the horizontal (…

How can we perceive and address ethical challenges in public health practice and policy? One way is by using ethical concepts to shed light on everyday practice. One does not have to be a specialist in ethics to do so. This document is part of a series of papers intended to introduce practitioners to some concepts, values, principles, theories and approaches that are important to public health ethics.

How can we perceive and address ethical challenges in public health practice and policy? One way is by using ethical concepts to inform our thinking. One does not have to be a specialist in ethics to do so. This document is part of a series of papers intended to introduce practitioners to some values, principles, theories and approaches that are important in public health ethics.

In this paper we will outline the concept of reciprocity as it may be applied in the ethics of public health. The goal of this paper is to present the concept as it has been developed and used in the literature.

“The social determinants of health are the circumstances in which people are born,grow up, live, work and age, and the systems put in place to deal with illness. These circumstances are in turn shaped by a wider set of forces: economics, social policies, and politics” (World Health Organization’s Commission on Social Determinants of Health [CSDH WHO], 2016).

“The underlying social structures and processes that systematically assign people to different social…

This document is intended to enable public health actors to more easily distinguish between the most widespread policy approaches that have been proposed to reduce health inequalities. The approaches that we will discuss are:

Health inequalities^…

This paper provides a very short summary of a longer paper of the same name. The longer work, including full references, is available online at: http://www.ncchpp.ca/docs/2014_Ethique_Reciprocity_En.pdf.

Whether considered as a value or formulated as a principle to guide actions, reciprocity is commonly appealed to in public health to help ensure that certain obligations due to others – or to be expected from…

Decision making in healthy public policy,¹ as in all policy areas, increasingly involves taking economic efficiency into consideration. Efficiency is the extent to which sought-after benefits can be obtained for the lowest possible cost, and the tools that measure it are economic evaluations. Efficiency is, however, but one of the many possible criteria according to which policy options can be judged. There is a range of other values and objectives that we may…

The first document in this series of briefing notes began with the observation that public health practitioners often struggle with ethical decisions in their practice but may not have relevant tools and resources to deal with these challenges. An assumption underlying this third paper is that by providing public health practitioners and decision makers with some guidance about practical public health ethics frameworks, they will be supported in making difficult ethical decisions that are……