The Canadian Invitational Workshop Report on the Health Technology Assessment in Newborn and Prenatal Screening: Ethical, Legal, and Social Issues was made available February 2008. The main purpose of the workshop was to use a recent research project, which reviewed the approaches to considering ELSIs in health technology assessment (HTA), as a launching pad to discuss the larger issue of incorporating ELSIs into decision-making. The workshop provided an opportunity to suggest recommendations for HTA practice and research, and provided a forum for discussion of the issues among stakeholders.
Twenty-eight individuals from health professionals to decision makers attended the workshop. The five cross-cutting messages listed below summarize the issues that were raised through the workshop.
There is ongoing debate about the scope of HTA in relation to ELSIs and health policy decisions.
Context is a key consideration for integrating ELSIs in HTA and for making HTA meaningful for policy decisions.
Diversity in stakeholder interests and in cultural values must be taken into account in considering ELSIs in HTA.
Prenatal and newborn screening programs raise unique ELSIs.
Transparency is important, in terms of identifying how ELSIs are identified, how they are considered, and the role they play in contributing to conclusions and recommendations in HTA.
In this report, the Nuffield Council on Bioethics considers some of the ethical issues that arise from efforts to improve
health at the population level, and it examines the roles and responsibilities of the different parties involved.
List of the key publications that inform the discipline of public health genetics, as selected by international experts in the field; members of GRaPH Int.
Wylie Burke and colleagues have published a commentary in Genetics in Medicine (July 2006) that describes the creation of GRaPH-Int. The paper reveals the path from genome-based knowledge to population health by reviewing the challenges of using genome-based research for the benefit of population health and making the case for an interdisciplinary knowledge integration process within and across disciplines.
"We hope that the implementation of the public health genomics enterprise around the world facilitated by the newly formed international network could over time begin to harness genome-based sciences and technologies for the benefit of population health in the 21st century," they write.
Related Resources
The path from genome-based research to population heath: Development of an international public health genomics network. Genomics in Medicine 2006; 8:451-458. http://www.graphint.org/docs/2006-08-burke.pdf
