Question

Reflect on the ethical consideration in the public health media of smoking cessation. what factors need to be considered to ensure human rights, gender equity, or other ethical issues that are prioritized over short-term programmatic gains?

Answer 1

Public health as an organized body began more than many decades ago, with the goal of improving the health, primarily, of populations rather than of individuals. Bioethics, helps health care professionals identify and respond to moral dilemmas in their work.

Public health practitioners use tools to epidemiology to accomplish their work, still focusing primarily on communitywide, typically prospective, approaches to improve health. Some public health functions surveillance, vital statistics, disease and injury reporting, and disease registries relate to epidemiology and the collection of data. The practitioners investigate outbreaks, conduct contact tracing, provide health education and other preventive interventions, and conduct research related to public health.

Contemporary medical ethics or research codes have made the right to noninterference central. The public health practitioners, lacking guidelines of their own, must turn to these same codes for professional moral direction. Existing medical or research codes do discuss traditional public health functions, such as breaching patient confidentiality to report diseases to the state.

Medical ethics is a system of moral principles that apply values to the practice of clinical medicine and in scientific research. Medical ethics is based on a set of values that professionals can refer to in the case of any confusion or conflict.

An individual’s Rights, Smoking and the Workplace. Most states have some laws that protect smokers from discrimination. Due to the health hazards related to smoking, smokers are not completely protected in the same way that the non-smokers are.

Public health ethics involves a systematic process to clarify, prioritize and justify possible courses of public health action based on ethical principles, values and beliefs of stakeholders, and scientific and other information.

An employer can refuse to hire someone if they smoke because smoking is not covered by the Human Rights Act. Some employers have negative attitudes to smokers and may refuse to hire them. Although this may not be considered fair, and not unlawful.

In addition to protecting its citizens from harm caused by others, the stewardship state has a particular responsibility for reducing health inequalities and protecting the health of vulnerable groups such as children. Public-health ethics are also an important consideration at an international level.

Most relevant issues in social media applications are confidence and privacy that need to be carefully preserved. The patient physician relationship can suffer from the new information gain on both sides since private information of both healthcare provider and consumer may be accessible. Physicians need to ensure they keep the borders between private and professional intact. Preserving patient’s anonymity, when citing the content which is crucial for research studies.

Exploiting medical social media in healthcare applications requires a careful reflection of roles and responsibilities. Availability of data and information can be useful in many settings, but the abuse of data needs to be prevented. Preserving privacy and confidentiality of online users is a main issue, as well as providing means for patients or Internet users to express concerns on data usage.