Public Health Ethics: Practices And Challenges Of Female Community Health Workers

Abstract

Practising public health ethics is essential to avert health problems within the community. It guarantees the safeguarding of human lives by preventive actions. Moreover, public health ethics conform to the concepts of transparency, confidentiality, information dissemination, individual autonomy, health enhancement, harm prevention, and the preservation of equity. Multiple socio-cultural and economic factors have been considered to enhance the understanding of the notion. In our country, the responsibility for protecting community health, particularly at the grassroots level, lies with female community health workers (CHWs). GOI launched the National Rural Health Mission to recruit the female community health workers. They are mainly voluntary workers hired to provide reproductive services to women. Our society largely overlooks the reproductive health rights of women. Traditional customs, cultural taboos and gender-biased norms have prevented women from achieving their reproductive rights. Under such conditions, understanding the socio-cultural context of people and addressing public health ethics have been challenging tasks, especially when the CHWs themselves are one of the most deprived sections. Thus, the current study using a literature survey has tried to understand the concept of public health ethics and its implications by the female community health workers and has also tried to elucidate the problems faced by the community health workers in practising public health ethics in our country.