Methods for case analysis in the practice of public health

Public health practitioners commonly address ethical issues in their daily practice, but may not identify those issues as “ethics.” Cases can be a useful way of building public health practitioners' capacity to address the ethical issues that do arise in their work. The use of common cases, such as a tuberculosis patient who is non-compliant with his medication, that highlight important public health ethics principles, such as balancing the interest of public health against individual liberty interests, provide a mechanism for developing ethics language amid familiar concepts. Facilitating a discussion of such cases can build a foundation for analyzing other, less common or even novel cases. This presentation will use cases that were used in webinars and other public health ethics training activities to illustrate how the cases and variations are crafted to develop certain themes and the various ways in which the cases may be used for ethics training. The presentation will draw on the CDC's experience in providing public health ethics training to identify effective approaches to training and potential pitfalls.