Telemedycyna stanowi stosunkowo nowe zjawisko w ochronie zdrowia, a jej wdrażanie generuje wiele pytań, na które eksperci reprezentujący różne dziedziny próbują znaleźć odpowiedź. Brakuje interdyscyplinarnych opracowań naukowych dotyczących oceny tej nowej możliwości w kontekście szeroko rozumianego dobra pacjenta. W artykule przedstawiono wybrane zagadnienia związane z telemedycyną poddawane pod dyskusję w literaturze przedmiotu. Autorka, będąc praktykującym lekarzem, zwraca również uwagę na pewne aspekty praktyczne z punktu widzenia pracownika ochrony zdrowia.

This important new book provides a philosophical and historical analysis of the subject, looking at a review of sociological and political theories concerning ...

The Republic of the Ukraine has a huge prison population and a large prison health care system. Like all other public services in that country it is lacking in sufficient funds to operate adequately and with due respect to the human rights of the prisoners and its health care employees. This report and observations are based on my knowledge of the Ukrainian health care system and a visit to a Ukrainian prison hospital. It includes some ethical reflections stemming from this (...) experience. Although problem-solving exercises can often help to point to areas of potential intervention that could ameliorate a troublesome situation, in this case prison health care conditions cannot be substituted for economic growth, political stability or increased awareness of societal moral obligations. (shrink)

“Congealing” is a word that evokes senses of unpleasantness where perhaps something inviting had once been. It also implies that things are becoming less fluid and more rigid. As we began organizing ETHICOMP 2018, we wanted a theme that reflected the impact of technologies on human cultures, practices and lives. Our initial draft of the theme was “Creating, Changing, and Congealing Ways of Life with Technologies.” And while we were eventually persuaded to use a more congenial way of putting the (...) idea (it became “Creating, Changing, and Coalescing Ways of Life with Technologies”), in some ways, it remains true for us that “congealing,” and its connotations of something less pleasant, gets at the original idea. As we incorporate technologies into our practices, much attention is paid to how they change our ways of doing things. But technologies can also help ways of life set-up and harden like yesterday’s leftovers – not appealing, yet difficult to budge and sometimes quite unhealthy. Once a particular process is built around a piece of technology, it can become entrenched and increasingly difficult to change. For a historical example, consider how difficult it was to adapt records and software on the eve of the 21st century in response to the so-called “Y2K” problem. In early software development, efficient use of memory was an important design consideration. It had become a standard practice to use a 2-digit field for the year, which would roll to from “99” to “00” in the year 2000, causing problems for datedependent functions. Technologies can also reflect and reinforce existing cultural tendencies. For a recent example, consider the human resources software created by Amazon that used its existing hiring data to train a machine-learning system to rate applicants. The resulting system turned out to be biased against women applicants, downranking resumes that included the word “woman” or “women’s.” Amazon ended up scrapping the project altogether. Because of these kinds of effects, we wanted to encourage people to think beyond well-worn paradigms like “technologies are disruptive” to consider other kinds of effects they can have. As it happened, the imagery of “congealing” proved distasteful enough that the steering committee opted for a more neutral term. But even with the less-dramatic wording the conference ended up attracting a rich and diverse range of papers that examined technological issues from a variety of angles, exactly as we had hoped. (shrink)