Webinar – Public Health Ethics: A Case in Infectious Disease Prevention and Control

The webinar, co-presented by the NCCHPP and the National Collaborating Centre for Infectious Diseases (NCCID), featured a case involving point-of-care HIV testing in remote or northern communities and highlighted evidence, implementation challenges and ethics. This webinar was intended to be of interest for public health specialists (including medical officers of health, program coordinators, physicians and nurses) as well as for a general audience. It was held on January 24, 2017

Our goal was to explore the ethical issues related to expanding access to point-of-care (POC) diagnostic technologies in Canada to improve testing coverage and reduce delays to treatment for infectious diseases in northern/remote communities. We bagan the discussion by outlining a case for consideration and then anchored it with a brief review of the evidence and key challenges regarding the implementation of POC testing programs in remote or northern regions. Then we turned our attention to considering the ethical issues raised by the case. To do this, we presented an ethics framework in order to guide ethical deliberation in which participants were able to:

• Identify ethical values and issues that are pertinent to the case,
• Consider how some conflicts may arise between values,
• Think about how to balance those conflicts in order to decide what needs to be done.

Presenters

Dr. Nitika Pant Pai
Assistant professor at McGill University, and researcher at McGill University Health Centre

Dr. Mohammad Khan, Medical Health Officer
Kelsey Trail Health Region, Saskatchewan

Michael Keeling and Olivier Bellefleur
Research Officers, NCCHPP

Series of webinars on Public Health Ethics

This was the second in a series of webinars presented by the NCCHPP in collaboration with our colleagues at the NCCs for public health. This series focuses on combining evidence and ethics to improve decision making in diverse sectors of public health practice. Our goal is to help practitioners to incorporate ethical perspectives into their everyday practices, including longer-term decision-making, with webinars designed to be relevant for practitioners and decision makers in the various areas served by the different NCCs.