Ethics in Public Health
Course objectives
The increased sensitivity for recognizing ethical issues in public health and the basic competence to deal with such issues are part of the understanding of professionalism in the field of public health. Students should therefore be able to systematically analyze various practical and methodological challenges in public health (especially in prevention, surveillance, health reporting and research) with the help of ethical methods and theories and to evaluate ethical solution strategies based on these.
The basic course aims to teach methods, theories and decision-making models for the structured identification and practical processing of ethical issues in public health. Equipped with these tools, students will be able to discuss classic and current ethical challenges and develop recommendations for dealing with them appropriately.
Course content
- Introduction to (public health) ethics
- Methods, theories and decision-making models of ethics
- Discussion of classical and current ethical issues in public health
- Researching ethical challenges in public health - aims and methods
- Fundamentals of research ethics (in particular research with human subjects)
Course length: 16 hours, each winter semester.
Lecturer: Dr. phil. Marcel Mertz, Dr. Hannes Kahrass, MPH
An additional advanced course in ethics is offered in the summer semester. In this course, fields of application from the areas of clinical ethics (therapy limitation, euthanasia, termination of pregnancy after prenatal diagnosis, organ donation and transplantation, clinical ethics counseling) and research ethics (stem cell research, cloning, Ethics Committees) are developed and discussed in presentations. The topics are agreed in advance with the course participants.
Course duration: 16 hours, each summer semester.
Lecturer: Dr. Gerald Neitzke