Checklists for assessing ethical aspects of health technologies and services

Bjørn Hofmann

doi:10.1071/HC24092

RESEARCH ARTICLE (Open Access)

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Checklists for assessing ethical aspects of health technologies and services

Bjørn Hofmann

¹ ² ^*

+ Author Affiliations

- Author Affiliations

¹ Centre of Medical Ethics, University of Oslo, PO Box 1130, Blindern, N-0318 Oslo, Norway.

² Institute for the health sciences, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Gjovik, Norway.

^* Correspondence to: b.m.hofmann@medisin.uio.no

Journal of Primary Health Care 16(3) 315-316 https://doi.org/10.1071/HC24092

Submitted: 29 June 2024 Accepted: 2 July 2024 Published: 16 July 2024

© 2024 The Author(s) (or their employer(s)). Published by CSIRO Publishing on behalf of The Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND)

In an interesting article, Madeleine Reid and Tania Moerenhout present a checklist for ethical aspects of virtual consultation services.¹ Based on a scoping review they develop a checklist of 25 specific questions. Such question-based approaches can be very useful in identifying and addressing ethical issues with health technologies and services.

Their checklist incites reflection on methods for addressing ethical issues in the implementation and use of health technologies and the provision of healthcare services. By now, there are a range of methods for addressing ethical issues in health technology assessment.²^–⁸ Some of these are question-based, such as Reid and Moerenhout’s framework.⁹^–¹²

It is interesting to notice that many of the main topics in these established question-based approaches are the same as in Reid and Moerenhout’s framework. Questions about autonomy, privacy, quality and safety of care, and equity are but some examples. Hence, there seems to be some generic issues for a broad range of health technologies and services.

Moreover, Reid and Moernehout illustrate that questions can be adapted to specific fields, such as virtual consultations. This is illustrated by a range of other studies as well.¹³^,¹⁴ Additionally, it is important to notice that specific (literature based) approaches may leave out important ethical questions, such as how the interests of stakeholders play out⁹, as well as the quality¹⁵ and bias¹⁶ of ethical arguments.

Therefore, generic approaches for addressing ethical issues with health technology and services can be useful for the development and use of specific frameworks, and vice versa.

Conflicts of interest

The author declares no conflicts of interest.

Declaration of funding

No specific funding was received for this.

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