Ethics, public and social health Flashcards
What is primary prevention?
Preventing the onset of disease
What is secondary prevention?
Preventing the progression of disease from a pre-clinical stage
What is tertiary prevention?
Preventing morbidity and mortality through treatment of clinical diseases
What are the 3 domains of public health?
Health improvement
Health protection
Healthcare Public Health
Describe the biomedical model of health and illness
Mind/body can be treated separately (mind/body dualism)
Reductionist
Body can be repaired
Knowledge is objective
More disease/pain = poorer health
Describe the social model of medicine
Medical knowledge is a sociological construct
Challenges mind/body dualism, more hollistic
Health and illness influenced by wider socioeconomic context
Knowledge not objective
What is consequentialism?
An act is evaluated solely in terms of its consequences
What is utilitarianism (preference and hedonistic)?
Maximising good/welfare
Preference utilitarianism: utility rises when preference is satisfied
Hedonistic: more pleasure less pain
What is deontology?
Features of the actions themselves determine if they are morally right/wrong
What are virtue ethics?
Focuses on the person
Act morally and ethically
Limitations of virtue ethics
Culture specific
too broad
ignores social and communal dimensions
Which social demographics are more likely to be overweight?
Most deprived (areas have more fast food outlets)
Disabled
What can define food insecurity?
Having smaller meals than usual or skipping meals due to being unable to afford
or get access to food.
Being hungry but not eating due to being unable to afford or get access to food.
Not eating for a whole day due to being unable to afford or get access to food.
What are direct costs of disease?
Ambulatory and inpatient medical care
Secondary costs of mental health, complications of treatment
What are indirect costs of disease?
Loss of paid and unpaid activities
Borne by patient, employer, society
What are some quality of life costs from disease?
Pain, anxiety, emotional
What is the definition of ageing?
progressive physiological changes in an organism that lead tosenescence, or a decline of biological functions and of the organism’s ability to adapt to (metabolic) stress
What is multimorbidity?
Co-occurrence of multiple disease at the same time, in the same person. As people age, they are more likely to experience several conditions at the same time
What is frailty?
characterised by diminished strength, endurance, and reduced physiologic function, increasing an individual’s vulnerability to dependency and/or death
What can influence healthy ageing?
Socioeconomic status
Working conditions
Diet
Ethnicity
Social networks
Hereditary illness
Health access
What are some challenges of the ageing population?
Strains on pensions and social security
Increasing demands for health care
Bigger need for trained health workforce
Increasing demand for long term care
Pervasive ageism that denies older people the rights and opportunities for other adults
What are the 2 types of ageing?
Intrinsic – natural, universal, inevitable
Extrinsic – dependent on external factors, UV rays, smoking, air pollution
What affects diet (4As)?
access, availability, affordability, awareness
What can determine health outcomes?
Income
Environment
Occupation
Culture
Societal Status
Access to education
What is the Nuffield ladder of interventions?
Do Nothing or simply monitor the situation
Provide Information:
Enable choice
Guide choice through changing the default
Guide choice through incentives
Guide choice through disincentives
Restrict choice
Eliminate choice
What are some examples of health protection?
Control of Infectious diseases
Environmental hazards
Chemicals / Radiation
Emergency Response
What can health improvement work on?
Inequalities
Education
Housing
Employment
Family / community
Lifestyles
Surveillance / Monitoring
What is healthcare public health?
Helping to ensure that the organisation of the wider NHS estate is fit for purpose and influencing expenditure
What is evidence based medicine?
the conscientious, explicit, and judicious use of the best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients
What are the 5 parts of evidence based medicine?
Finding evidence
Assessing the evidence
Synthesising the evidence
Making good decisions
Evaluating performance against the evidence
What are 4 major study designs that can be used for evidence?
Cross-sectional survey
Case-control
Cohort
Randomised Controlled Trial (RCT)
What does PICO stand for when framing a research question?
Patient or Population (under study)
Intervention (exposure, treatment or procedure)
Comparator/ control (that which is compared against the intervention)
Outcome (endpoint of interest)
What is screening?
A process which sorts out apparently well people who probably have a disease (or precursors or susceptibility to a disease) from those who probably do not
What is a diagnostic test?
confirms whether the condition is present or not
What is the doctrine of double effect?
where certain criteria are met, a person acts ethically when acting to bring about a good or morally neutral effect, even if her action also has certain foreseen, though not intended or desired, bad effects
What are the 2 types of imperative?
Hypothetical e.g. eat well to keep healthy
Categorical e.g. don’t lie or steal
What are the 5 focal virtues?
Compassion
Discernment
Trustworthiness
Integrity
Conscientiousness
What are the 4 principles of ethics?
Autonomy
Beneficience
Non-maleficience
Justice
What is the purpose of beneficience?
provide benefit to others
Better off than before
What is the purpose of autonomy?
patient has the ultimate decision-making responsibility for their own treatment
What is the purpose of non-maleficience?
do no harm or allow harm to be caused to a patient through neglect
What is justice in medical ethics?
whether it’s compatible with the law, the patient’s rights, and if it’s fair and balanced
What does impairment mean?
any loss or abnormality of psychological, physiological or anatomical structure or function
What does disability mean?
a restriction or lack (resulting from an impairment) of ability to perform an activity in a manner or within the range considered normal for a human being
What does handicap mean?
a disadvantage for a given individual, resulting from an impairment or a disability, that limits or prevents the fulfilment of a role that is normal for that individual
What are the 4 criteria of good care?
Co-participation in care and the patient as decision maker
Acceptance of an open agenda
Holistic rather than biomedical orientation: ‘persons’ in context’ rather than managing disease
Development of counselling skills: awareness of impact of illness and advising on coping strategies
What is iatarogenesis?
side effects and risks associated with the medical intervention
What are some common issues of medicine in the media?
Media requires stories to be “news-worthy”
Stories often from press releases from potentially biased sources
Stories discuss possible implications of research without any information about or critique of actual research findings
Findings, especially statistics, are often mis-represented