Search

Objectives To explore the history of transnational tobacco companies' use of the term, approach to and perceived benefits of ‘harm reduction'. Methods Analysis of internal tobacco industry documents, contemporary tobacco industry literature and 6 semistructured interviews. Results The 2001 Institute of Medicine report on tobacco harm reduction appears to have been pivotal in shaping industry discourse. Documents suggest British American Tobacco and Philip Morris International adopted the term ‘harm reduction' from Institute of Medicine, then proceeded to heavily emphasise the term in their corporate messaging. Documents and interviews suggest harm reduction offered the tobacco industry two main benefits: an opportunity to (re-) establish dialogue with and access to policy makers, scientists and public health groups and to secure reputational benefits via an emerging corporate social responsibility agenda. Conclusions Transnational tobacco companies' harm reduction discourse should be seen as opportunistic tactical adaptation to policy change rather than a genuine commitment to harm reduction. Care should be taken that this does not undermine gains hitherto secured in efforts to reduce the ability of the tobacco industry to inappropriately influence policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reports the changes in the direction of health policy for blood cholesterol concentrations. Association between cholesterol concentration and risk of ischemic heart disease; Identification of people at high risk for heart disease; Determination of density lipoprotein components.

A blog about the British government's policy on health care is presented.

Background: There is mounting evidence that experience of care is a crucial part of the pathway for successful management of long-term conditions. Design and objectives: To carry out (1) a systematic mapping of qualitative evidence to inform selection of studies for the second stage of the review; and (2) a narrative synthesis addressing the question, What makes for a 'good' or a 'bad' paediatric diabetes service from the viewpoint of children, young people, carers and clinicians? Rsults: The initial mapping identified 38 papers. From these, the findings of 20 diabetes-focused papers on the views on care of =650 children, parents and clinicians were synthesised. Only five studies included children under 11 years. Children and young people across all age groups valued positive, non-judgemental and relationship-based care that engaged with their social, as well as physical, health. Parents valued provision responsive to the circumstances of family life and coordinated across services. Clinicians wanting to engage with families beyond a child's immediate physical health described finding this hard to achieve in practice. Limitations: Socioeconomic status and ethnicity were poorly reported in the included studies. Conclusions: In dealing with diabetes, and engaging with social health in a way valued by children, parents and clinicians, not only structural change, such as more time for consultation, but new skills for reworking relations in the consultation may be required. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nearly 400 million adults have been vaccinated against COVID-19. Children have been excluded from the vaccination programmes owing to their lower vulnerability to COVID-19 and to the special protections that apply to children's exposure to new biological products. WHO guidelines and national laws focus on medical safety in the process of vaccine approval, and on national security in the process of emergency authorisation. Because children suffer much from social distancing, it is argued that the harms from containment measures should be factored in a broader perspective on the good of the child. Considering the available knowledge on the disease, vaccine, and coping strategies, the decision about vaccine access to children is a public responsibility. The ultimate choice is a matter of paediatric informed consent. Moreover, jurisdictions that permit non-participation in established childhood vaccination programmes should also permit choice of vaccines outside of the approved programmes. Even if vaccine supply is too short to cover the paediatric population, the a priori exclusion of children is unjust. It may also exacerbate local and global inequalities. The second part of the paper delineates a prudent and ethical scheme for gradual incorporation of minors in vaccination programmes that includes a rigorous postvaccination monitoring. This is a theoretical paper in ethics that uses the Pfizer vaccine as a stock example, without discussing possible differences among existing vaccines. The key purpose is reflection on the good of the child in emergencies and vaccine policymaking., Competing Interests: Competing interests: None declared., (© Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2021. No commercial re-use. See rights and permissions. Published by BMJ.)

The Sustainable Development Goals, Global Strategy for Women's, Children's and Adolescents' Health (2016-2030) and Nurturing Care Framework all include targets to ensure children thrive However, many projects to support early childhood development (ECD) do not 'scale well' and leave large numbers of children unreached. This paper is the fifth in a series examining effective scaling of ECD programmes. This qualitative study explored experiences of scaling-up among purposively recruited implementers of ECD projects in low- and middle-income countries. Participants were sampled, by means of snowball sampling, from existing networks notably through Saving Brains®, Grand Challenges Canada®. Findings of a recent literature review on scaling-up frameworks, by the WHO, informed the development of a semistructured interview schedule. All interviews were conducted in English, via Skype, audio recorded and transcribed verbatim. Interviews were analysed using framework analysis. Framework analysis identified six major themes based on a standard programme cycle: planning and strategic choices, project design, human resources, financing and resource mobilisation, monitoring and evaluation, and leadership and partnerships. Key informants also identified an overarching theme regarding what scaling-up means. Stakeholders have not found existing literature and available frameworks helpful in guiding them to successful scale-up. Our research suggests that rather than proposing yet more theoretical guidelines or frameworks, it would be better to support stakeholders in developing organisational leadership capacity and partnership strategies to enable them to effectively apply a practical programme cycle or systematic process in their own contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BACKGROUND: Smoking is one of the biggest avoidable causes of morbidity and mortality in the United Kingdom. This paper quantifies the current health and economic burden of smoking in the UK. It provides comparisons with previous studies of the burden of smoking in the UK and with the costs for other chronic disease risk factors. METHODS: A systematic literature review to identify previous estimates of National Health Service costs attributable to smoking was undertaken. Information from the World Health Organization’s Global Burden of Disease Project and routinely collected mortality data were used to calculate mortality due to smoking in the UK. Population-attributable fractions for smoking-related diseases from the Global Burden of Disease Project were applied to NHS cost data to estimate direct financial costs. RESULTS: Previous studies estimated that smoking costs the NHS about £1.4 billion to £1.7 billion in 1991 and has been responsible for about 100 000 deaths per annum over the past 10 years. This paper estimates that the number of deaths attributable to smoking in 2005 was 109 164 (19% of all deaths, 27% deaths in men and 11% of deaths in women). Smoking was directly responsible for 12% of disability adjusted life years lost in 2002 (15.4% in men; 8.5% in women) and the direct cost to the NHS was £5.2 billion in 2005–6. CONCLUSION: Smoking is still a considerable public health burden in the UK. Accurately establishing the burden in terms of death, disability and financial costs is important for informing national public health policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I outline and explore some problems in the way that the Nuffield Council of Bioethics' report Public Health: Ethical Issues (2007) presents its 'Intervention Ladder'. They see the metaphor of a ladder both as capturing key normative priorities and as making a real and important contribution to ethical policymaking in public health. In this paper I argue that the intervention ladder is not a useful model for thinking about policy decisions, that it is likely to produce poor decisions and that it is incompatible with the report's stated approach to relevant public health policy values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I reply to Tony Hope's response to my non-identity paper, aiming to clarify the nature of my objections, and also to address, briefly, Hope's suggestion that the implications of my view are that any book written for a lay audience ought to seek to present a 'balanced overview'. Essentially, I suggest that there may be a pro tanto consideration in favour of such an approach, but this would only be one consideration, to be weighed against competing considerations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, various tobacco 'endgame' strategies have been suggested as a means to phase out tobacco consumption. Using country examples, this paper discusses three potential strategies: replacing cigarettes with alternative products (harm reduction), denying tobacco sales to people born after a certain year (the tobacco-free generation proposal), and further implementing measures based on the WHO Framework Convention for Tobacco Control (FCTC) treaty. It is argued that all strategies have potential issues that could be avoided by combining them into an integrated, sequential endgame that, first, using measures recommended in the WHO FCTC, creates a climate that facilitates the phasing out of cigarettes; second, implements a generational phase out of cigarette sales; and third, simultaneously permits the regulated use of alternative nicotine products. Thus, integrating ideas from various endgame strategies will result in a more effective, resilient tobacco endgame policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Community participation and leadership is a central tenet of public health policy and practice. Community engagement approaches are used in a variety of ways to facilitate participation, ranging from the more utilitarian, involving lay delivery of established health programmes, to more empowerment-oriented approaches. Evaluation methods within public health, adapted from clinical medicine, are most suited to evaluating community engagement as an ‘intervention’, in the utilitarian sense, focusing on the health impacts of professionally determined programmes. However, as communities are empowered and professional control is relinquished, it is likely to be harder to capture the full effects of an intervention and so the current evidence base is skewed away from knowledge about the utility of these approaches. The aim of this paper is to stimulate debate on the evaluation of community engagement. Building on current understandings of evaluation within complex systems, the paper argues that what is needed is a paradigm shift from viewing the involvement of communities as an errant form of public health action, to seeing communities as an essential part of the public health system. This means moving from evaluation being exclusively focused on the linear causal chain between the intervention and the target population, to seeking to build understanding of whether and how the lay contribution has impacted on the social determinants of health, including the system through which the intervention is delivered. The paper proposes some alternative principles for the evaluation of community engagement that reflect a broader conceptualisation of the lay contribution to public health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The NHS in England is an organisation undergoing substantial change. The passage of the Health and Social Care Act 2012, consolidates and builds on previous health policies and introduces further 'market-style' reforms of the NHS. One of the main aspects of these reforms is to encourage private and third sector providers to deliver NHS services. The rationale for this is to foster a more competitive market in healthcare to encourage greater efficiency and innovation. This changing healthcare environment in the English NHS sharpens the need for attention to be paid to the ethical operation of healthcare organisations. All healthcare organisations need to consider the ethical aspects of their operation, whether state or privately run. However, the changes in the type of organisations used to provide healthcare (such as commercial companies) can create new relationships and ethical tensions. This paper will chart the development of organisational ethics as a concern in applied ethics and how it arose in the USA largely owing to changes in the organisation of healthcare financing and provision. It will be argued that an analogous transition is happening in the NHS in England. The paper will conclude with suggestions for the development of organisational ethics programmes to address some of the possible ethical issues raised by this new healthcare environment that incorporates both private and public sector providers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background Germany has been identified as one of a few high-income countries that opposed a strong Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), the WHO's first global public health treaty. This paper examines whether the tobacco industry had influenced the German position on the FCTC. Methods Analysis of previously confidential tobacco industry documents. Results The tobacco industry has identified Germany as a key target within its global strategy against the FCTC. Building on an already supportive base, the industry appears to have successfully lobbied the German government, influencing Germany's position and argumentation on key aspects of the FCTC. It then used Germany in its efforts to weaken the FCTC. The evidence suggests that the industry enjoyed success in undermining the Federal Health Ministry's position and using Germany to limit the European Union negotiating mandate. The tactics used by the tobacco industry included the creation of controversy between the financial, trade and other ministries on one side and the health ministry on the other side, the use of business associations and other front groups to lobby on the industry's behalf and securing industry access to the FCTC negotiations via the International Standardization Organization. Conclusion The evidence suggests that Germany played a major role in the tobacco industry's efforts to undermine the FCTC. Germany's position consistently served to protect industry interests and was used to influence and constrain other countries. Germany thus contributed significantly to attempts to weaken an international treaty and, in doing so, failed in its responsibility to advance global health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Genomics provides information on genetic susceptibility to diseases and new possibilities for interventions which can fundamentally alter the design of fair health policies. The aim of this paper is to explore implications of genomics from the perspective of equal opportunity ethics. The ideal of equal opportunity requires that individuals are held responsible for some, but not all, factors that affect their health. Informational problems, however, often make it difficult to implement the ideal of equal opportunity in the context of healthcare. In this paper, examples are considered of how new genetic information may affect the way individual responsibility for choice is assigned. It is also argued that genomics may result in relocation of the responsibility cut by providing both new information and new technology. Finally, how genomics may affect healthcare policies and the market for health insurance is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Study objective: To examine the Canadian origins of the Lalonde Report and its impact on British and American health promotion activities. Design: A brief history of the development of key Canadian documents and their use by politicians and public health activists in the United Kingdom and United States. Setting: This paper focuses on the impact of the Canadian model on Canada, the United Kingdom and United States. Main results: This paper argues that internal political and economic forces are as important as international trends in determining healthcare policy initiatives. Conclusions: In the 1970s all the English-speaking developed nations were facing deficits as curative costs rose. Adopting health promotion policies permitted them to shift responsibility back to local governments and individuals while limiting their expenditures. Health and community activists, however, used this concept to broaden their focus to include the social, economic and political determinants of health and thus reinvented public health discourse and practice for the 21st century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper the coherence of the precautionary principle as a guide to public health policy is considered. Two conditions that any account of the principle must meet are outlined, a condition of practicality and a condition of publicity. The principle is interpreted in terms of a tripartite division of the outcomes of action (good outcomes, normal bad outcomes and special bad outcomes). Such a division of outcomes can be justified on either "consequentialist" or "deontological" grounds. In the second half of the paper, it is argued that the precautionary principle is not necessarily opposed to risk-cost-benefit analysis, but, rather, should be interpreted as suggesting a lowering of our epistemic standards for assessing evidence that there is a link between some policy and "special bad" outcomes. This suggestion is defended against the claim that it mistakes the nature of statistical testing and against the charge that it is unscientific or antiscientific, and therefore irrational. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most recent controversies to arise in the field of bioethics concerns the ethics for the Groningen Protocol: the guidelines proposed by the Groningen Academic Hospital in The Netherlands, which would permit doctors to actively euthanise terminally ill infants who are suffering. The Groningen Protocol has been met with an intense amount of criticism, some even calling it a relapse into a Hitleresque style of eugenics, where people with disabilities are killed solely because of their handicaps. The purpose of this paper is threefold. First, the paper will attempt to disabuse readers of this erroneous understanding of the Groningen Protocol by showing how such a policy does not aim at making quality-of-life judgements, given that it restricts euthanasia to suffering and terminally ill infants. Second, the paper illustrates that what the Groningen Protocol proposes to do is both ethical and also the most humane alternative for these suffering and dying infants. Lastly, responses are given to some of the worries expressed by ethicists on the practice of any type of non-voluntary active euthanasia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Study objective: The concept of social capital has influenced mental health policies of nations and international organisations despite its limited evidence base. This papers aims to systematically review quantitative studies examining the association between social capital and mental illness. Design and setting: Twenty electronic databases and the reference sections of papers were searched to identify published studies. Authors of papers were contacted for unpublished work. Anonymised papers were reviewed by the authors of this paper. Papers with a validated mental illness outcome and an exposure variable agreed as measuring social capital were included. No limitations were put on date or language of publication. Main results: Twenty one studies met the inclusion criteria for the review. Fourteen measured social capital at the individual level and seven at an ecological level. The former offered evidence for an inverse relation between cognitive social capital and common mental disorders. There was moderate evidence for an inverse relation between cognitive social capital and child mental illness, and combined measures of social capital and common mental disorders. The seven ecological studies were diverse in methodology, populations investigated, and mental illness outcomes, making them difficult to summarise. Conclusions: Individual and ecological social capital may measure different aspects of the social environment. Current evidence is inadequate to inform the development of specific social capital interventions to combat mental illness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Francis Report, the result of a UK public inquiry into ongoing mistreatment of patients at a large teaching hospital, revealed deep-rooted flaws in care delivery and professional performance. It led to regulatory review, policy initiatives and public outcry. To this point, it has not led to any extended or focused discussion on the sustenance or well-being of nurses so that we might avoid it happening again. This paper emerges from the writing and publication of a novel called Stranger Than Kindness and a subsequent PhD. The novel explored the themes of damaged or hurt healthcare professionals and their attempts at restoration or in one case, redemption. The paper uses the novel as 'data' for an articulation of the emotional world of (some) nurses and imports three theoretical perspectives; McGilchrist's work on the divided brain, Damasio's work on emotion and Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology to support an emerging philosophical position of embodied cognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In regulating the voluntary interruption of pregnancy, English law has accorded particular significance to two biological events. First, 'viability', the moment when a fetus is said to acquire the capacity for independent life, plays an important role in grounding restrictions on access to legal abortion later in pregnancy. Second, equally significantly but far less frequently discussed, 'implantation' marks the point in pregnancy from which abortion laws apply. This paper focuses on this earlier biological event. It suggests that an unquestioning reliance on implantation as marking an appropriate moment of transition between two radically different legal frameworks is deeply problematic and is rendered still less sustainable in the light of the development of new technologies that potentially operate shortly after the moment of implantation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues against incorporating assessments of individual responsibility into healthcare policies by expanding an existing argument and offering a rebuttal to an argument in favour of such policies. First, it is argued that what primarily underlies discussions surrounding personal responsibility and healthcare is not causal responsibility, moral responsibility or culpability, as one might expect, but biases towards particular highly stigmatised behaviours. A challenge is posed for proponents of taking personal responsibility into account within health policy to either expand the debate to also include socially accepted behaviours or to provide an alternative explanation of the narrowly focused discussion. Second, a critical response is offered to arguments that claim that policies based on personal responsibility would lead to several positive outcomes including healthy behaviour change, better health outcomes and decreases in healthcare spending. It is argued that using individual responsibility as a basis for resource allocation in healthcare is unlikely to motivate positive behaviour changes, and is likely to increase inequality which may lead to worse health outcomes overall. Finally, the case of West Virginia's Medicaid reform is examined, which raises a worry that policies focused on personal responsibility have the potential to lead to increases in medical spending overall., (Published by the BMJ Publishing Group Limited. For permission to use (where not already granted under a licence) please go to http://www.bmj.com/company/products-services/rights-and-licensing/.)

Background Youth consumption of cigarillos (ie, little cigars) has increased markedly in recent years. In July 2010, the Canadian government banned the sale of flavoured cigarillos and required unflavoured cigarillos to be sold in packs of at least 20 units. This paper assesses changes in young persons' use of cigarillos and regular cigars, which are potential substitutes, following the policy. Methods To investigate of the change in cigar smoking following the policy, we constructed a segmented regression model that allowed the policy to change the height and the slope of the trend in the outcome variables. The model was estimated using data from the 2007-2011 Canadian Tobacco Use Monitoring Surveys. Results We obtained visual and regression-based evidence that use of cigarillos among youth declined following the policy. We also found a small, gradual increase in their use of regular cigars, possibly due to their compensatory switching from cigarillos to regular cigars. Overall, there was a net reduction in cigar use among youth after the intervention. Interpretation The policy achieved its goal of reducing youth's consumption of cigarillos, but may have an unintended consequence of increasing their use of regular cigars. Policymakers should address the possibility that youth switch to regular cigars in response to restricted access to cigarillos. Possible ways of discouraging this substituting behaviour include extending the ban to cover all flavoured cigars and mandating a minimum pack size for all cigars, or raising taxes on flavoured cigars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review seeks to explore and explain what health policy research is and why it matters, through pooling the evidence and providing case examples. Alongside examining the types of research involved, and their rationale the paper identifies the challenges taking part in this sort of research may create. Finally the paper suggests how to make clinical research more accessible to policy makers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the authors consider the idea of the public biobank governance framework with respect to the innovative paradigm of One Health. The One Health initiative has been defined as an integrative and interdisciplinary effort to improve the lives and well-being of human beings and non-human animals, as well as to preserve the environment. Here, we use this approach as a starting presumption with respect to institutional design. We examine the theoretical and legal framework underlying the concept of biobanking that, being public orientated, is for the public good. We suggest that this account of research practice does not ethically correlate with One Health principles. Instead, we argue that One Health requires a model of biobanking that is based on universal goods, that is, goods that serve human beings as well as non-human animals and the environment, and which we define in detail. Our purpose is to begin a discussion on how One Health principles might be implemented in health initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]