Developing public health ethics training: The role of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)

Ethical challenges commonly arise in the practice of public health. Every day public health officials grapple with how to allocate scare resources, how to respect individual rights while protecting the public good, how to protect underserved and marginalized communities while engaging and sharing information in a transparent manner, how to protect data confidentiality and individual privacy while conducting surveillance. The Public Health Ethics Unit at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is exploring ways to support health officials in their efforts to address public health ethics concerns. Working with the Ethics Subcommittee of the CDC Advisory Committee to the Director, the CDC held a series of webinars with state, tribal, local, and territorial health officers to share information about public health ethics and to learn about the key ethical challenges facing health departments. Using this information, we developed a process for constructing public health ethics cases studies and pilot tested the use of cases for training local health officials. This presentation will provide information about the topics identified as common public health ethics challenges, will describe the process we used to develop case studies, and will highlight the essential elements of practical and useful public health ethics case studies. The presenter will also discuss how to best use cases to illustrate the process of ethical analysis in public health using examples from our recent training experiences.