Toward justice in health care.

Healthy Justice: A Liberation Approach to Justice in Health Care

Without social justice, we cannot promote population health nor a universal public health system necessary to support it. In the words of Norman Daniels “social justice is good for our health.”1 Catholic social teaching has important insights to contribute to the social justice debate in health and public health care. Drawing upon this tradition, I will explore the concepts of justice and the c...

Distributive justice and health care.

Justice and equal opportunities in health care.

The principle that each individual is entitled to an equal opportunity to benefit from any public health care system, and that this entitlement is proportionate neither to the size of their chance of benefitting, nor to the quality of the benefit, nor to the length of lifetime remaining in which that benefit may be enjoyed, runs counter to most current thinking about the allocation of resources...

Principles of justice in health care rationing.

This paper compares and contrasts three different substantive (as opposed to procedural) principles of justice for making health care priority-setting or "rationing" decisions: need principles, maximising principles and egalitarian principles. The principles are compared by tracing out their implications for a hypothetical rationing decision involving four identified patients. This decision has...

Exploring distributive justice in health care.

The allocation of resources to providers and the way in which the resources are then prioritised to specific service areas and patients remain the critical ethical decisions which determine the type of health system a community receives. Health care providers will never be given enough resources to satisfy all the demands placed upon them by a community that is becoming increasingly informed an...