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The purpose of this paper is to contribute knowledge on ethical issues and reasoning in expert reports concerning healthcare governance, commissioned by the Swedish healthcare system.

An in-depth analysis of ethical issues and reasoning in 36 commissioned expert reports was performed. Twenty-seven interviews with commissioners and producers of the reports were also carried out and analysed.

Some ethical issues were identified in the reports. But ethical reasoning was rarely evident. The meaning of ethical concepts could be devalued and changed over time and thereby deviate from statutory ethical goals and values. Several ethical issues of great concern for the Swedish public healthcare were also absent.

The commissioner of expert reports needs to ensure that comprehensive ethical considerations and ethical analysis are integrated in the expert reports.

Based on an extensive data material this paper reveals an ethical void in expert reports on healthcare governance. By avoiding ethical issues there is a risk that the expert reports could bring about reforms and control models that have ethically undesirable consequences for people and society.

This study aims to examine the perceptions and evaluations of Muslim COVID-19 survivors and health workers regarding the halal, business and ethical attributes of hospitals during their interactions related to COVID-19 treatment.

Descriptive qualitative research with semi-structured online interviews was used to gather insights from COVID-19 survivors and health workers who treated COVID-19 patients. The findings were then compared with existing literature on hospital services and Sharia attributes.

The study found that patients and health-care workers in hospitals are concerned about whether the hospital follows Sharia law, the quality of health-care and hospital services and the ethical conduct of hospital staff. This is especially true during the COVID-19 pandemic, when patients are more anxious about religious conduct and the afterlife.

Hospitals need to address halal attributes in all aspects of their services for Muslim patients and business attributes such as standard health-care quality, service quality and ethical attributes. Participants indicated that when these needs are met, they are more likely to revisit the hospital and recommend it to others.

This study contributes to understanding the expectations of Muslim patients regarding hospital services that meet Islamic ethical and business requirements. Using the COVID-19 pandemic as a case study broadens the understanding of how to better serve Muslim customers.

Unequal social conditions that provide people with unequal opportunities to live healthy lives are considered unjust and associated with “health inequity”. Governing power is impacting people's lives through laws, policies and professional decisions, and can be used intentionally to combat health inequity by addressing and changing people's living- and working conditions. Little attention is paid to how these ways of exercising governing power unintentionally can structure further conditions for health inequity. In this paper, the authors coin the term “governance determinants of health” (GDHs). The authors' discussion of GDHs potential impact on health inequity can help avoid the implementation of governing strategies with an adverse impact on health equality. This paper aims to discuss the aforementioned objective.

The authors identify Governance Determinants of Health, the GDHs. GDHs refer to governance strategies that structurally impact healthcare systems and health equality. The authors focus on the unintended, blind sides of GDHs that maintain or reinforce the effects of socioeconomic inequality on health.

The power to organize healthcare is manifested in distinct structural approaches such as juridification, politicalization, bureaucratization and medical standardization. The authors explore the links between different forms of governance and health inequalities.

The authors' discussion in this article is innovative as it seeks to develop a framework that targets power dynamics inherent in GHDs to help identify and avoid GDHs that may promote unequal access to healthcare and prompt health inequity. However, this framework has limitations as the real-world, blurred and intertwined aspects of governing instruments are simplified for analytical purposes. As such, it risks overestimating the boundaries between the separate instruments and reducing the complexity of how the GDHs work in practice. Consequently, this kind of theory-driven framework does not do justice to the myriad of peoples' complex empirical practices where GDHs may overlap and intertwine with each other. Nevertheless, this framework can still help assist governing authorities in imagining a direction for the impacts of GDHs on health equity, so they can take precautionary steps to avoid adverse impacts.

The authors develop and explore – and demonstrate – the relevance of a framework that can assist governing authorities in anticipating the impacts of GDHs on health inequity.

Sharing project information is critical for the success of medical crowdfunding campaigns. However, few users share medical crowdfunding projects on their social networks, and the sharing behavior of medical crowdfunding projects on social networking sites has not been well studied. Therefore, this study explored the factors and potential mechanisms influencing users’ sharing behaviors on networking sites.

A research model was developed based on the attribution-affect model of helping and social capital theory. Data were collected using a longitudinal survey. Partial least squares structural equation modeling was used to analyze the collected data. We conducted post hoc analyses to validate the results of the quantitative analysis.

The analysis results verified the effects of perceived external attribution, perceived uncontrollable attributions, and perceived unstable attributions on sympathy and identified the effect of sympathy and social characteristics of medical crowdfunding users on sharing behavior.

This research provides a comprehensive theoretical understanding of users’ sharing behavior characteristics and provides implications for enhancing the efficiency of medical crowdfunding activities.

New Public Management-informed pay-for-performance policies are common in public sectors internationally but can be controversial with delivery agents. More attention is needed on contingent forms of bottom-up implementation of challenging policies, in emerging market economies, for professionals who face tensions between policies and their codes of practice. Street-level bureaucrats (SLBs) mediate policy implementation through discretionary practices; health professionals have enhanced space for discretion based on autonomy derived from professional status. The authors explore policy implementation, adaptation and resistance by physicians, focusing on payments for health workers in Turkey.

The researchers conducted semi-structured qualitative interviews with 12 physicians in Turkish hospitals and thematic analysis of interview transcripts, using a blended (deductive and inductive) approach.

The policy fostered discretionary behaviours such as cherry-picking (high volume, low risk procedures) and pro-social rule-breaking (e.g. “upcoding”), highlighting clinical autonomy to navigate within policy restrictions. Respondents described damage to relationships with patients and colleagues, and dissonance between professional practice and perverse policy incentives, sometimes leading to disengagement from clinical work. Policymakers were perceived to be detached from the realities experienced by SLBs. Tensions between the policy and professional values risked alienating physicians.

This study utilises participant self-reported perceptions of discretionary behaviours. Further work may adopt alternative methods to explore the relationship between self-reporting and observed practice.

The authors contribute to research on differentiated, contingent roles of groups with high scope for discretion in bottom-up implementation, pointing to the potential for policy-professional role conflicts between top-down P4P policies, and the values and codes of practice of professional SLBs.

Current research about American Indians of all ages is in short supply, yet design and allocation of public services and resources are increasingly guided by ‘evidence’ provided by research. The health and wellness of this population is persistently poorer than that of other marginalized populations. American Indian tribes have been beset progressively since the earliest arrival of European settlers by both malevolent and well-intentioned assaults on their cultures and peoples. This long history of cultural and physical genocide continues into the present and undermines the effectiveness of Eurocentric processes for research that have been shaped by values and beliefs antithetical to those of most tribes (e.g. individualism, proprietary ownership, science as the way of knowing). Individual and collective historical trauma is present in all of the more than 500 federally recognized tribes in the United States of America, and a lack of trust further compromises the validity and positive impact of most research. This chapter describes the roots and foundations of flawed and successful research and identifies practical resources and approaches that are valid and beneficial for conducting research with indigenous people. The processes described in this chapter are grounded in the experiences of tribes in the United States of America; however, parallel experiences of indigenous populations that have a continuing legacy of trauma are found in many other countries (such as in Brazil and New Zealand) and the insights and approaches found in this chapter may be applicable to some degree.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the key roles of transparency in making artificial intelligence (AI) greener (i.e. causing lesser carbon dioxide emissions) during the design, development and manufacturing stages or processes of AI technologies (e.g. apps, systems, agents, tools, artifacts) and use the “explicability requirement” as an essential value within the framework of transparency in supporting arguments for realizing greener AI.

The approach of this paper is argumentative, which is supported by ideas from existing literature and documents.

This paper puts forward a relevant recommendation for achieving better and sustainable outcomes after the reexamination of the identified roles played by transparency within the AI technology context. The proposed recommendation is based on scientific opinion, which is justified by the roles and importance of the two approaches (compliance and integrity) in ethics management and other areas of ethical studies.

The originality of this paper falls within the boundary of filling the gap that exists in sustainable AI technology and the roles of transparency.

This study aims to examine the potential of Information Ethics (IE) to serve as a coherent ethical foundation for the library and information science profession (LIS profession).

This study consists of two parts: the first part present IE’s central theses and the main critiques it has received; the second part offers the authors' own evaluation of the theory from the LIS perspective in two steps: (1) assessing its internal consistency by testing its major theses against each other; (2) assessing its utility for resolving frequently debated LIS ethical dilemmas by comparing its solutions with solutions from other ethical theories.

This study finds that IE, consisting of an informational ontology, a fundamental ethical assertion and a series of moral laws, forms a coherent ethical framework and holds promising potential to serve as a theoretical foundation for LIS ethical issues; its inclusion of nonhuman objects as moral patients and its levels of abstraction mechanism proved to be particularly relevant for the LIS profession. This study also shows that, to become more solid an ethical theory, IE needs to resolve some of its internal contradictions and ambiguities, particularly its conceptual conflations between internal correctness, rightness and goodness; between destruction, entropy and evil; and the discrepancy between its deontological ethical assertion and its utilitarian moral laws.

This study alerts LIS professionals to the possibility of having a coherent ethical foundation and the potential of IE in this regard.

This study provides a systemic explication, evaluation and field test of IE from the LIS perspective.

This research theoretically proposed and empirically validated a Customer-Based Brand Equity (CBBE) scale specifically for Medical Tourism for emerging economies including recent findings from tourism theories such as gravity model and signalling theory, but more specifically accommodating political, cultural, economic, legal and social influences.

In-depth literature reviews from tourism, medical tourism, healthcare and hospitality domains are used to propose the theoretical model. The authors have used the lavaan package in R for the empirical analysis and model verification.

The research included, tested and verified the established latent variables such as “brand awareness”, “brand association”, “perceived quality” and “loyalty”, along with new observed variables for the CBBE scale from the theoretical perspectives of this research. “Infrastructure” has emerged as a new scale construct and “culture” was found to be a moderating variable for “perceived quality” in the CBBE scale, which are novel additions to the literature.

The research contributed to scale refining, latent construct assessment, and fine-tuning of the observed variables for the mentioned theoretical gaps.

This study examines the determinants of medical crowdfunding performance. Drawing on signaling theory, the authors investigate how funding-related signals (funding goal and duration), story-related signals (text length, text sentiment, and use of first-person pronouns), and donor-related signals (donor identity disclosure) affect medical crowdfunding performance.

This study analyzed the data of 754 medical crowdfunding projects collected from the Qingsongchou platform in China to test the proposed model.

The empirical findings reveal that both funding goal and funding duration exhibit a U-shaped relationship with crowdfunding performance. Additionally, the authors find evidence that story text length and donor identity disclosure are positively related to crowdfunding performance, whereas the use of first-person pronouns is negatively related to crowdfunding performance.

This study extends the understanding of the determinants of medical crowdfunding performance through the signaling theory. Specifically, this study provides new insights into the roles of funding goal and funding duration in predicting medical crowdfunding performance and identifies several new predictors of crowdfunding performance, including the use of first-person pronouns in project story text and donor identity disclosure.