Tough Choices:
The Ethics of Allocating Health Resources

You are invited to the inspiring setting of Banff Alberta, against the majestic backdrop of the Canadian Rockies, to reflect on the ethical dimension of allocating health resources. This conference and retreat has been designed as an opportunity to escape the tensions of the boardroom in order to discuss difficult resource allocation decisions with colleagues and distinguished thinkers in the field in a thoughtful and supportive environment.

Who Should Attend?
The conference has explicitly been designed for senior health policy analysts, board members of regional health authorities, and senior administrative personnel of health institutions and community-based health organizations.

Preamble and Purpose
When it comes to deciding what health care services to fund, difficult and complex choices abound. And because there will never be enough resources to meet everyone's needs, these hard choices will exist regardless of funding levels. Decision-makers facing these questions intuitively recognize that such decisions have crucial ethical implications, but it is not always easy to understand exactly what these implications are, and perhaps more importantly, how explicitly to take them into consideration and come up with a clear, defensible, values-based decision.

This project aims to bring together, for the first time, two distinct groups of people: a carefully selected group of respected and influential North American scholars in the field of resource allocation ethics, and those Albertans and Canadians most directly entrusted with the decision-making authority and responsibility for improving the health of their communities. The main purpose of this conference is to equip decision-makers with tools and skills that will allow them to approach hard decisions in a more systematic manner, explicitly grounded in carefully considered values, and to have greater confidence that the decisions they are involved in making are grounded on an ethically defensible moral foundation