Abstracts Health Sciences

RESPECTING THE ETHICAL TENSION BETWEEN SURVEILLANCE AND PRIVACY IN PROMOTING PUBLIC HEALTH AND DISEASE MANAGEMENT

by Kamal Althobaiti

The recognition of the need to undertake surveillance and to protect privacy is well established. However, the continually changing circumstances and fast-paced development of healthcare today requires a continuing need to respect this ethical tension between surveillance and privacy. Hence, this dissertation is to respect the ethical tension between surveillance and privacy in promoting public health and disease management. This dissertation investigates the ethics of conducting public health surveillance, including the challenges associated with obtaining consent and protecting data from unauthorized access. The dissertation will focus on the ethical consequences of big data, including issues associated with obtaining informed consent, data ownership, and privacy. As the dissertation concludes, it will provide an ethical justification of observing privacy in public health surveillance. The analysis is pursued in the dissertation in the following manner. After a brief introduction in Chapter 1, the analysis begins in Chapter 2 by explaining the importance of consent with regard to protecting privacy, including confidentiality in clinical ethics. Chapter 3 moves the discussion to the realm of public health ethics, discussing two examples of population health matters to illustrate the dissertation’s focus. Chapter 4 focuses on the complex issue of disease management for which the ethical tension between surveillance and privacy is pivotal. Chapter 5 then discusses the critical need for respecting this ethical tension in research protocols from a global perspective. Chapter 6 moves the discussion to the fast-developing debate of data analysis in healthcare for which respecting the ethical tension between surveillance and privacy will be pivotal for the continuing success in this new arena. Finally, Chapter 7 provides a brief conclusion to the dissertation.