Ethical issues in public health surveillance: a systematic qualitative review.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Public health surveillance is not ethically neutral and yet, ethics guidance and training for surveillance programmes is sparse. Development of ethics guidance should be based on comprehensive and transparently derived overviews of ethical issues and arguments. However, existing overviews on surveillance ethics are limited in scope and in how transparently they derived their results. Our objective was accordingly to provide an overview of ethical issues in public health surveillance; in addition, to list the arguments put forward with regards to arguably the most contested issue in surveillance, that is whether to obtain informed consent.

Methods

Ethical issues were defined based on principlism. We assumed an ethical issue to arise in surveillance when a relevant

SUBMITTER: Klingler C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5381137 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature