Abstract
Health policy refers to the decisions, plans, and actions that are undertaken by organizations to promote health. In practice, health policy is a dynamic process involving setting health-related goals, designing systems and programs to meet those goals, implementing these systems and programs, and monitoring their outcomes. The array of decisions and actions that fall under the umbrella of health policy is vast, and the reach of these decisions can be profoundly influential. These decisions nearly always affect the health and well-being of groups of people, impose limits on individual rights, or require individual cooperation, so that many of the principles of bioethics are at play when these decisions are made and when they are carried out.
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Further Readings
Beauchamp, T. L., & Childress, J. F. (2009). Principles of biomedical ethics (6th ed.). New York: Oxford University Press.
Danis, M., Clancy, C. M., & Churchill, L. R. (2002). Ethical dimensions of health policy. New York: Oxford University Press.
Kass, N. E. (2001). An ethics framework for public health. American Journal of Public Health, 91(11), 1776–1782.
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Danis, M., Nayak, R. (2015). Health Policy. In: ten Have, H. (eds) Encyclopedia of Global Bioethics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05544-2_223-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05544-2_223-1
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