BTHX 5000/BTHX 8000 | Public Health Ethics
Jan. 20 - May 4
This course will explore ethical issues in pandemic response, including contingency and crisis standards of care, protections for health professionals and other critical workers who serve in high risk settings, and promotion of equity in pandemic response. We will also consider whether frameworks designed to promote ethical pandemic response can be helpful in guiding response to other types of mass casualty events. Dr. DeBruin co-led the development of ethics guidance for public health emergencies in Minnesota prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, and co-leads the Minnesota COVID Ethics Collaborative, an interprofessional group that has been developing ethics guidance for COVID-19 response in the state. This course will be offered fully online, with a mixture of live discussions via Zoom and asynchronous conversations via discussion boards in Canvas.
About the Instructor:

Debra DeBruin, PhD, primarily works on issues in public health ethics and the ethics of health policy, with a focus on concerns about social justice and health equity. Much of this work addresses issues of gender, race, and socioeconomic disadvantage. She also has done substantial work on public health emergency planning, with an emphasis on the importance of equity in this perilous context. She co-directed the Minnesota Pandemic Ethics Project and led the project to develop ethics guidance for Crisis Standards of Care in Minnesota; both of these projects were conducted under contract with the Minnesota Department of Health (MDH). During the COVID-19 pandemic, she co-led the Minnesota COVID Ethics Collaborative, a statewide advisory group that provided input to MDH on ethical issues in pandemic response.
In addition to teaching philosophy and bioethics, Dr. DeBruin has served as a health policy fellow for Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA) in the Democratic office of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee of the United States Senate. She has also worked as a consultant to the National Academy of Science's Institute of Medicine and the National Bioethics Advisory Commission on issues relating to the ethics of research.
In addition to her scholarly work in bioethics, Dr. DeBruin has a strong record of administrative leadership for the Center for Bioethics. Over the years, she has served as Director of Graduate Studies, Director of Education, Associate Director, and Director/Interim Director.
Dr. DeBruin received her BA from Carleton College magna cum laude with distinction in philosophy and her PhD in philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh. She completed a Greenwall Postdoctoral Fellowship in Bioethics and Health Policy at Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health and Georgetown University.