In 2000, Alberta's Premier's Advisory Council on Health requested that the PHEN staff provide a presentation to the Council addressing ethical issues involved in developing public policy and allocating resources. Representatives from the PHEN staff and board made a presentation to the Council in Feburary 2001. The paper provided here provides a summary of the presentation, and was submitted to the Council in April 2001.

In what is likely to be a different vein from most other submissions to the Premier’s Council, and given's PHEN's organizational policy of 'philosophical neutrality'. this paper makes no recommendations about the content of possible options for the direction of Alberta’s health system. Rather, it offers suggestions about the method and process by which decisions about Alberta’s future health system could be made, and provides discussion of several pressing ethical issues to be addressed in the area of health policy decision-making.

The Alberta Pandemic Influenza Contingency Plan Project is part of the international and federal planning for the pandemic. The Alberta Interdepartmental Pandemic Influenza Committee, led by Alberta Health and Wellness and Alberta Municipal Affairs, struck a Working Group to develop a plan in five areas: surveillance, communications, emergency preparedness, vaccine and antiviral delivery and health services.

Recognizing that the decisions made in these areas are value laden and would benefit from careful and systematic consideration from an ethics perspective, the Working Group requested PHEN to deliver a presentation identifying the ethical dimension of the work and offering a framework for thinking about these issues from an ethics perspective.

The Provincial Health Ethics Network, in conjunction with the CCHSA, hosted discussion sessions in Grande Prairie, Fort McMurray, Edmonton, Calgary and Lethbridge to solicit feedback on those sections of the new standards relating to the addressing of ethical issues and their incorporation into decision-making in healthcare organizations.

PHEN has also compiled a selection of excerpts of the new accreditation standards that will be of particular interest to health ethics committees in Canada. You can download this summary here. 

The Provincial Health Ethics Network, in conjunction with 16 Regional Health Authority and Long Term Care Centres, hosted discussions sessions in Calgary and Edmonton in December 1999 to consider Recommendation #46 of the report, Take Steps to Address Ethics Issues. Feedback and discussion was summarized in the document below, submitted to Alberta Health and Wellness in January 2000

In 1999, the Provincial Health Ethics Network was invited to appoint a representative to the Alberta Advisory Committee on Organ and Tissue Donation and Transplantation.

The purpose of the Committee was to develop a framework for a coordinated provincial system of organ and tissue donation and transplantation, in light of the shortage of these in relation to potential transplant recipients.

The Provincial Health Ethics Network appointed Dr. Michael Sting, Assistant Professor, University of Lethbridge, as its representative to the Committee.