A. M. Viens – författare

Medicine and health care generate many bioethical problems and dilemmas that are of great academic, professional and public interest. This comprehensive resource is designed as a succinct yet authoritative text and reference for clinicians, bioethicists, and advanced students seeking a better understanding of ethics problems in the clinical setting. Each chapter illustrates an ethical problem that might be encountered in everyday practice; defines the concepts at issue; examines their implications from the perspectives of ethics, law and policy; and then provides a practical resolution. There are 10 key sections presenting the most vital topics and clinically relevant areas of modern bioethics. International, interdisciplinary authorship and cross-cultural orientation ensure suitability for a worldwide audience. This book will assist all clinicians in making well-reasoned and defensible decisions by developing their awareness of ethical considerations and teaching the analytical skills to deal with them effectively.

The goal of improving public health involves the use of different tools, with the law being one way to influence the activities of institutions and individuals. Of the regulatory mechanisms afforded by law to achieve this end, criminal law remains a perennial mechanism to delimit the scope of individual and group conduct. Utilising criminal law may promote or hinder public health goals, and its use raises a number of complex questions that merit exploration. This examination of the interface between criminal law and public health brings together international experts from a variety of disciplines, including law, criminology, public health, philosophy and health policy, in order to examine the theoretical and practical implications of using criminal law to improve public health.

Public health activity, and the state’s public health responsibilities to assure the conditions in which people can be healthy, can only be achieved through different means of social coordination. This places law and regulation at the heart of public health. They are fundamental both to methods of achieving public health goals and to constraints that may be put on public health activity. As such, trainees, practitioners, and leaders in public health need to understand the breadth and nature of wide-ranging legal and regulatory approaches and the place of ethics in public health.Public Health Law, written by three leading scholars in the field, defines and examines this crucial area of study and practice. It advances an agenda whose scope extends far beyond that covered in traditional medical law and health care law texts. The authors provide an account of the scale of contemporary public health policy and practice and explain its philosophical depths and implications and its long legislative and regulatory history. They advance a definition of the field and explore how different legal approaches may serve and advance or constrain and delimit public health agendas.This ground-breaking book presents the field of public health ethics and law and goes on to examine the impact within the UK of private law, criminal law, public law, EU and international law, and ‘softer’ regulatory approaches. It is a primary point of reference for scholars, practitioners, and leaders working in public health, particularly those with an interest in law, policy, and ethics.