Página 390 - Dimensiones éticas de las regulaciones en salud

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Towards a value-based public health in Latin
America and the Caribbean. The work of
PAHO bioethics program 1
Fernando Lolas
Introduction
Public health has attained a disciplinary status based on subject matter,
methods, and theoretical approaches. In some countries, decision-making
is evidence-guided and translation between research data and policy for-
mulation proceeds smoothly. In others, the incorporation of research evi-
dence and critical thinking into planning, implementation and evaluation
is altered by political interference, poor-quality research, or irrelevance of
data to social needs. These problems are ethical as well as technical and
can be approached with tools developed by bioethics. We have argued for
a value-based as complementary to an evidence-based public health(1). The
aim is to add “ethical sustainability” to economic and cultural sustainabil-
ity in decision-making. The usefulness of bioethics lies in linking differ-
ent stakeholders and different disciplinary discourses in order to formulate
socially acceptable goals, to respect the rights of persons and communities, and
to honor the duties of professionals(2).
Bioethics theory and practice have become essential components of
knowledge relevant in several areas: human rights, equity in healthcare,
social determinants of health, health impact of science and medical tech-
1 Supported in part by grant number 5R25TW006056 – 06 NIH-Fogarty International
Center.