Healthcare ethics and health equity: Improving access to care through equity-focused ethical reasoning and participatory ethics research with health professionals and equity-deserving groups in BC

Uncertainty about how to ethically provide healthcare services can create barriers to care, as access to care is slowed or stopped while ethical concerns are addressed. These barriers to care can affect the health of members of equity-deserving groups, such as people who use drugs and Two-Spirit, transgender, and nonbinary people. This research focuses on gaps in knowledge about unresolved ethical issues affecting equity-deserving groups in British Columbia. Ethical issues will be addressed by: designing and testing strategies to enhance ethical reasoning skills among health professionals; working with members of equity-deserving groups and health professionals to resolve ethical dilemmas; developing a new method for ethical analysis; and openly sharing resources and resolutions. It is anticipated that the ability of health professionals to respond to ethical dilemmas will be enhanced and access to care will improve for members of equity-deserving groups. Enhanced ethical reasoning and expanded access to ethical resolutions will change practice through reducing barriers to care and support evidence-based policy, while developing a participatory empirical ethical analysis method will support future research in healthcare ethics.