News by Subject Policy & Ethics

National data analyzed by University of Minnesota Medical School researchers show that nearly 40 percent of all funds used to pay for medical school are expected to come from family or personal sources and scholarships. The prevalence of these sources, however, varies widely by race and socioeconomic status.

An investigation from UK academics suggests that safeguards put in place in New Zealand to protect drug policy from Big Pharma's influence offer important lessons for the UK when striking new trade deals.

New research published in Nature Medicine reveals willingness to get a COVID-19 vaccine was considerably higher in developing countries (80% of respondents) than in the United States (65%) and Russia (30%). The study provides one of the first insights into vaccine acceptance and hesitancy in a broad selection of low- and-middle income countries (LMIC), covering over 20,000 survey respondents and bringing together researchers from over 30 institutions.

More than 40% of physicians in the United States reported at least one symptom of burnout, which is particularly high among family physicians. This study examined a nationally-representative sample of family physicians to determine whether physician race-ethnicity was associated with burnout among a nationally-representative sample of family physicians.

Researchers at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work found that more than half of U.S. citizen migrant children living in Mexico were underinsured, and the situation is even more stark for those living in urban settings and along the border. They are now calling for transborder policies to address place-based inequity in health coverage.

In the United States, massive volumes of individual-level data, called "big data," are used for a variety of reasons, including marketing, intelligence gathering and political campaigns. Big data are also vital to public health efforts, such as improving population health, informing personalized medicine and transforming biomedical research. However, it can be challenging to use big data for health applications due to laws and concerns about individual privacy.

How a pandemic progresses in a country is largely determined by social, political and psychological processes. Predicting these socio-dynamics seems hardly possible until today; thus making it impossible to foresee the course the pandemic takes. This is where a new simulation study carried out by the Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon comes into play, which is now published in the journal Scientific Reports.

In a new article, researchers address some of the ethical decisions that go into decisions to split a liver and provide a model to help hospitals make SLT decisions.

New research from Aarhus BSS at Aarhus University shows that openness about the effectiveness and side effects of vaccines bolster confidence in the health authorities, and this is a crucial factor if we are to defeat the coronavirus pandemic.