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Public health law is in the midst of a crisis of public confidence, which, this paper contends, has resulted from the lack of a thorough normative framework to ground public health law. This paper attempts to fill this gap by articulating a normative framework for public health law, situating it within a rule of law tradition in a limited, democratic state. This paper proceeds in three parts: it begins with a descriptive analysis of public health law; it examines the normative theories of rule of law and liberty; and, it examines public health law in light of the normative theories. This paper concludes that public health law, conceived as government interference, is consistent with rule of law and liberty and that rule of law and liberty help provide public health law with a normative framework.

Aim The aim of the study was to establish if resources for health care were distributed in a manner which reflected justice and equity for people with mental illness at primary health care (PHC) level where mental health services were integrated into general health services. This was done by establishing if relevant South African health policy and legislation makes relevant provisions for the transformation of health care service in line with primary health care principles. Selected health care system delivery strategies were analysed to establish if these reflect justice and equity in the distribution of health resources within a particular health district. Finally, an appropriate workload criteria was used to establish how currently employed health personnel were allocated in terms of skill mix per population size within a selected health district. Methodology The study was conducted in eThekwini District in the Durban Metropolitan area. A combination of descriptive and analytic study designs were adopted using the Health Systems Research(HSR)l as the framework for the study. The descriptive component was used to set the context for the study. The analytic component was used to establish the causal link between mental health policy provisions and the current distribution of health resources. Human resource allocation was used as the indicator for mental health resource allocation.2 Simple random sampling method was used to select six sampling units of Primary Health care (PHC) areas from the sampling frame of three Sub-Districts which constituted eThekwini District; namely North, South and West Sub-Districts. Mental Health Policy and related Legislation was analysed to establish how these made provisions for resource allocations in mental health care. The South African Workload ratios from Rispel et.al. in WHO (2003) 3 were used to determine personnel allocation per level of care and per population size served. The distribution of personnel was calculated using the fulltime equivalent scale (FTE).4 The geographical location of health facilities was established from the District maps to determine the location of mental health personnel. Results At policy level, even though relevant health legislation makes specific provisions for the development, distribution and management of human resources, the literature review indicated that there are still gaps in policies for human resource production, distribution, management and health service delivery. At implementation level research findings indicated marked understaffing across all primary health care levels. Results also showed that the total number of currently employed health personnel in most sample PHC areas fell below the norm recommended for the population size. In addition, integrated primary health care service was mainly offered by one health discipline compared to the recommended personnel skill mix of eight health disciplines. On the other hand, there was also an underlying historical over-concentration of health facilities in urban-based areas compared to rural based areas. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2006.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2006. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-07, Section: A, page: 2478. Adviser: Reginald J. Alston. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 123-130) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / The United States is experiencing a severe opioid use epidemic with more than 2 million people currently suffering from opioid use disorder (OUD), of which, over 1 million need treatment. Opioid treatment programs (OTPs) are evidence-based modality providing comprehensive care to individuals experiencing OUD. OTPs provide counseling, medical assessments, and medication-assisted treatment, which decrease the use of illicit opioids, reduce associated deaths, criminality, and improve the psychosocial wellbeing of its patients. However, OTPs have been extensively regulated at the federal, state, and local levels with little consistency and varying degrees of enforcement across the country, particularly at the state level, creating a “regulatory fog”. This complex regulatory environment has made it challenging to study new or changing regulations and their impact on health outcomes. In order to better understand the variation of OTP regulation, this dissertation: (1) employs public health law research methods to map the entire landscape of state-level regulation of OTPs and associated state characteristics in effect on January 1, 2017; (2) examine how state-level regulations affect the delivery of care from the perspective of OTP administrators through key-information interviews; and (3) examines associations between regulatory burden and related health outcomes of individuals experiencing OUD, by state.

This dissertation explores tensions between individual freedom and institutional authority. Chapter one examines public perceptions of the legitimacy of "new frontier" public health measures. I present results from a national survey of 1,817 adults concerning the acceptability of public health interventions for noncommunicable diseases. We found that support for these interventions is high overall; strongly associated with race and political orientation; and tied to perceptions of democratic representation in policy making. There was much support for strategies that enable people to exercise healthful choices, but considerably less for more coercive measures. These findings suggest that the least coercive path will be the smoothest. Additionally, the findings underscore the need for policy makers to involve the public in decision making, understand the public's values, and communicate how policy decisions reflect this understanding.

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Cette thèse s’intéresse à la protection de la vie privée informationnelle dans le contexte de la biosécurité. La biosécurité se définit comme le processus qui vise à prendre en charge, dans une optique de sécurité nationale, les menaces et dangers que représentent les épidémies de maladies infectieuses pour la santé des populations humaines et la sécurité de l’État. Notre projet remet en question l’idée selon laquelle la conduite des activités de surveillance de la santé publique implique nécessairement une diminution de la protection offerte aux renseignements personnels sur la santé. Nos recherches tendent à démontrer que la conciliation de la surveillance de la santé et la protection de la vie privée est non seulement possible, mais qu’elle est surtout nécessaire. Nous portons plus précisément notre attention sur le cas de la collecte et de l’utilisation de renseignements dépersonnalisés sur la santé par les systèmes de surveillance syndromique. Bien calibrée et soigneusement réglementée, cette forme novatrice et particulière de surveillance offrirait le double avantage de réduire les risques d’atteintes à la vie privée des individus et d’augmenter de manière considérable l’efficacité des capacités étatiques en matière de détection des épidémies. / This thesis focuses on the protection of privacy in the context of biosecurity. Biosecurity is concerned with the threats that epidemics of infectious diseases present to public health and national security. The main goal of my thesis is to challenge the idea that conducting meaningful public health surveillance necessarily implies that the scope of the legal protection given to personal health information has to be reduced. My research demonstrates that, given certain conditions, a public health surveillance conducted with carefully configured syndromic surveillance systems operating with de-identified health data would increase both the efficiency of surveillance in terms of its capacity to detect emerging epidemics and the level of informational privacy of the patients.

The purpose of this thesis is to prove the existence of the right to adequate healthcare through a critical analysis of the law of obligations, constitutional law and international law framed in the wider focal point of South African medical law. The Constitution only makes provision for the right to access to health care. Conclusively this thesis will have to establish a link between a minimum standard in health care and the Constitution. It is submitted that the most efficacious method of establishing this link is with the duty of care, which is intrinsically linked to the doctor-patient relationship. If a critical analysis of the doctor-patient relationship can establish a clear link between the duty of care and state liability then such a link can successfully be applied to the Constitution. If this link is transposed onto the Constitution, a critical evaluation of the rights in the Bill of Rights will then reveal the most applicable right that can house the right to an adequate standard of health care. Such an analysis is only part of the solution however. In order to make this right effective, the international body of medical laws must be critically analysed and juxtaposed against this adequate standard. This carries the dual purpose of adding normative content as well as determining the current state of South Africa’s obligations under international human rights law, and to what extent those obligations have been discharged. Finally, and most significantly, the right to adequate healthcare, as it was forged in the international legal analysis, will be transposed onto the current South African jurisprudence of socio-economic rights. This practical application will then be reflected onto the new National Health Care Insurance to show conclusively that the current governmental approach of effecting health care is wholly inoperable and will ultimately result in significant harm and extensive human rights violations. This is based on the government only considering access to health care sufficient to discharge its duties and being totally incapable of effectively managing its resources. The core outcome for this thesis is to prove the existence of the right to adequate healthcare. Secondary outcomes are tracing the history of medicine to illustrate the creation and evolution of the doctor-patient relationship, a critical analysis of the application of medical ethics to South African law of obligations, a critical analysis of the Constitution and its fundamentals, an exhaustive evaluation of South Africa’s duties and accomplishments under its international obligations and effectively applying the right to adequate healthcare which is diametrically opposed to the current course South Africa is taking to provide health care. / Dissertation (LLM)--University of Pretoria, 2012. / Public Law / unrestricted