Opportunities and Challenges in the Use of Public Deliberation to Inform Public Health Policies

摘要

Baum and colleagues’ (2009) article is an excellent example of the growing interest in and use of public deliberation methods to inform ethically challenging public health policies. These types of studies not only provide important content knowledge about the policy issue under study (i.e., public values toward social-distancing measures implemented during a pandemic) but also advance an emerging field of inquiry in the sub-discipline of health policy ethics. The study authors tackle three central issues of interest to scholarsworking in this area: 1) the different goals that may be pursued through public deliberation; 2) the ‘core’ elements that might constitute deliberative methodologies; and 3) what participants and policymakers take away from their experience with these types of processes.