Can digital health democratise healthcare?
Location:
Online
Date/time
Thu 3 November 2022
14:00 - 15:30 (GMT)
The Mason Institute and Centre for Biomedicine, Self and Society present a seminar with Dr Tereza Hendl, of the University of Augsburg.
Much has been said about the potential of digital health technologies for democratising healthcare. But how exactly is democratisation with digital health technologies conceptualised and what does it involve? Upon a closer look at debates on democratisation with digital health, democratisation of healthcare is being envisioned as a matter of access to health information, healthcare and patient empowerment. However, an exploration of the growing pool of empirical evidence on digital health shows that these technologies come short of materialising these goals, given the inequalities they reinforce. Building on this evidence, not only debates on democratisation need to be connected with concerns of socio-political determinants of health but debates on the individual, social and global impact of digital health need to go far beyond concerns of democratisation towards concerns of health justice.
About the speaker
Dr Tereza Hendl is a philosopher and bioethicist, currently working as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Augsburg and Research Associate at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Germany. Her research spans across political and feminist philosophy and normative ethics. She investigates concerns of justice, vulnerability, empowerment and solidarity and the ethics and epistemology of health technologies. She was awarded the 2015 Max Charlesworth Prize in Bioethics by the Australasian Association of Bioethics and Health Law and was a Visiting Scholar at the University of Oxford (UK), the Brocher Foundation (Switzerland), the Australian National University and the Hastings Center (USA).
