Legault, Georges-Auguste and K.-Bédard, Suzanne and Béland, Jean-Pierre and Bellemare, Christian A. and Bernier, Louise and Dagenais, Pierre and Daniel, Charles-Étienne and Gagnon, Hubert and Parent, Monelle and Patenaude, Johane (2021) Eliciting Value-Judgments in Health Technology Assessment: An Applied Ethics Decision Making Paradigm. Open Journal of Philosophy, 11 (02). pp. 307-325. ISSN 2163-9434
ojpp_2021051314382372.pdf - Published Version
Download (651kB)
Abstract
The worldwide COVID-19 pandemic has shed more light on the difficulty of making health care decisions integrating scientific knowledge and values associated to life and death issues, human suffering, quality of life, economic losses, liberty of movement, etc. But the difficulties related to health care decisions and the use of innovative drugs or technologies are not new, and many countries have created agencies that have the mandate to evaluate new technologies in health care. Health Technological Assessment (HTA) reports’ aim is to guide the decision makers in these difficult matters. There are two ethical components in HTA. The first is the report’s presentation of an ethical evaluation of the technology. The second is the value-ladenness of the HTA decision-making process itself. When implicit value judgments are not elicited, the justification of the final decision cannot be transparent. The present paper aims to identify and elicit the implicit value-judgments related to each step of the HTA process. This research is grounded on an applied ethics decision-making paradigm based on the role of value judgments in the decision-making process. The first part discusses two different approaches to values and value judgments in HTA. In the second part, citations mentioning value judgments extracted from a systematic review on the integration of ethics into HTA were categorized to elicit the value judgments and their criteria for each different HTA decision-making steps. The results show that there are 18 decision-making steps in the HTA process where 23 implicit value-judgments can be recognized. The range of these value judgments encompasses the whole HTA process: from the initial request, the presenting of the principal issues, to the final report’s dissemination. Since stakeholders need to understand which value judgments the conclusion of a report relies on, eliciting the implicit value judgments in the HTA decision-making process should yield more transparency.
Item Type: | Article |
---|---|
Subjects: | Middle East Library > Social Sciences and Humanities |
Depositing User: | Unnamed user with email support@middle-eastlibrary.com |
Date Deposited: | 30 Jun 2023 05:37 |
Last Modified: | 20 Sep 2024 04:21 |
URI: | http://editor.openaccessbook.com/id/eprint/1241 |