Public health ethics education in public health masters in Spain: Current status and available resources for teaching

Abstract

Ethics education of public health (PH) professionals is insufficient, despite general consensus on the need for it. This article aims to describe the extent to which Spanish masters of public health (MPH) have adopted ethic courses, and to review teaching and/or learning resources on PH ethics available in English. We explored Internet sites from current MPH in Spain and searched for teaching resources using different strategies. A total of 14 MPH were identified out of which seven (50.0%) teach ethics. Ethics is taught together with other aspects of PH in all cases. A total of 12 textbooks on PH ethics were reviewed, five of them include case studies and most have good or high value as teaching tools.

Keywords

• ethics
• public health
• education
• teaching materials
• reference books