title: Teaching seven principles for public health ethics: towards a curriculum for a short course on ethics in public health programmes.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Teaching ethics in public health programmes is not routine everywhere - at least not in most schools of public health in the European region. Yet empirical evidence shows that schools of public health are more and more interested in the integration of ethics in their curricula, since public health professionals often have to face difficult ethical decisions.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The authors have developed and practiced an approach to how ethics can be taught even in crowded curricula, requiring five to eight hours of teaching and learning contact time. In this way, if programme curricula do not allow more time for ethics, students of public health can at least be sensitised to ethics and ethical argumentation. This approach - focusing on the application of seven mid-level principles to cases (non-maleficence, beneficence, health maximisation, efficiency, respect for autonomy, justice, proportionality) - is presented in this paper. Easy to use 'tools' applying ethics to public health are presented.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The crowded nature of the public health curriculum, and the nature of students participating in it, required us to devise and develop a short course, and to use techniques that were likely to provide a relatively efficient introduction to the processes, content and methods involved in the field of ethics.
authors.affiliation: Department of International Health, School for Public Health and Primary Care (caphri), Maastricht University, Postbus 616, Maastricht, MD 6200, The Netherlands. peter.schroederbaeck@uni-bremen.de.
authors.forename: Peter
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Schröder-Bäck
authors.forename: Peter
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Duncan
authors.forename: William
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Sherlaw
authors.forename: Caroline
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Brall
authors.forename: Katarzyna
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Czabanowska
mesh_terms: D003479:Curriculum; D004504:Education, Medical, Undergraduate; D004992:Ethics, Medical / Q000193:education*; D006801:Humans; D011634:Public Health / Q000193:education / Q000941:ethics*; D012577:Schools, Medical