A CDC Preparedness and Emergency Response Research Center
Legal and Ethical Indicators for Adaptive Public Health System Response (LEIP)
The public health system is an interdependent network of public and private sector agencies, institutions, and individuals that include not only governmental public health agencies, hospitals, and community based health care providers, but also involve law enforcement, civic groups, faith institutions, emergency medical services, and more. This complex system endeavors day to day to fulfill the mission of public health: ensuring societal conditions in which people can be healthy. It is this same system that has been tasked with the duty to prevent, protect against, quickly respond to, and recover from health emergencies. The laws, regulations, policies, and ethical issues that direct and control the actions of and interactions between each agent within the public health system serve to either facilitate or frustrate the system’s ability to effectively plan for and respond to public health emergencies. To date, however, there is no empirical evidence that demonstrates and quantifies the impact that these laws and policies – both within and across the public health system’s agents – have upon the system’s ability to efficiently function as a scalable and sustainable preparedness and response system.
Purpose
The overall purpose of this project is to create a translatable evidence base for the impact of law, policy, and ethical standards upon public health preparedness and response systems. To accomplish this, the project will pursue the following specific aims:
- Develop a comprehensive inventory of the legal and ethical factors impacting the public health system’s ability to prepare for and respond to an emergency with public health consequences.
- Test the impact of identified legal and ethical constraints upon the public health system’s ability to prepare for and respond to an emergency with public health consequences by applying these factors to computational agent based modeling.
- Recommend empirically based model statements of law, ethics, and policy that can be integrated into the field to improve the public health system’s ability to prepare for and respond to an emergency with public health consequences.
- Develop strategies for communicating, disseminating, and translating the results of this research into policy and practice.
Conclusion
The public health system, recognized and being studied as a complex adaptive system, has the freedom and ability to respond to stimuli in different and fundamentally unpredictable ways. However, in many regards, the purpose of law is to make human behavior more predictable. This research will determine how law and ethical standards, imposing varying levels of proscription/prescription upon public health system agent behaviors, impact the systems’ ability to efficiently and effectively plan for, and respond to public health emergencies. To improve preparedness and response systems, the legal relationships between public health system partners will be defined, the impact of the law upon the system’s response capacity will be quantified, and methods for translating the research into practice will be proposed. The outcome of this research will be model statements of law that can be integrated into the field to improve public health system preparedness and response capabilities.
Core and Project Arms
- Administrative Core
- 1 - Adaptive Response
Indicators - 2 - Legal and Ethical
Indicators - 3 - Prep. and Adaptive
Response Model - 4 - Decision-Support
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