Integrating Public Health and Social Justice Teaching in Medicine and Bioethics

Public Health in Bioethics and Medical Education: The purpose of this presentation is to describe our practice of integrating public health education and bioethics for medical and graduate bioethics students. Bioethics is primed to integrate public health by framing the understanding of illness by its social determinants and the social, occupational, and national inequalities in health. In both our medical school and graduate school courses, we use a public health framework to explore bioethical concepts e.g. health disparities, health equity, and cardiovascular disease risk. Such an approach has a natural affinity with the principle of social justice in bioethics. In the near future, bioethics may come from behind the closed doors of the medical clinic and into the community and public domain where Public Health Ethics and the Ethics of Collaboration could become new areas of study.