Resources for local health departments for building infrastructure to support ethical decision making

Local health departments (LHDs) address a wide array of issues and interact with numerous stakeholders.  Ethical considerations underlie all aspects of public health practice at the local level, ranging from difficult staffing decisions, to decision making regarding allocation of scarce resources, to best approaches for protecting vulnerable populations.  Tensions are often most pronounced when public health interventions impact individual liberties in order to protect the public’s health and safety.  Local health officials must be prepared to identify, analyze and resolve these and other ethical challenges as they arise.  Since 2010, NACCHO has partnered with the CDC Public Health Ethics Unit to work towards building infrastructure in public health ethics at LHDs.  This collaboration has focused on increasing LHD awareness of and access to relevant public health ethics tools and information.  Early work included development of an eLearning training module on the application of an ethical analysis framework for decision making by local health officials.  More recently, work has focused on developing a set of recommendations to illustrate how NACCHO, LHDs, and other key stakeholders may work together to develop the infrastructure needed to implement and sustain a public health ethics activity.  The presentation will review the work NACCHO has done on public health ethics and explore some future opportunities for collaboration with other partners, including the APHA Ethics Section.