Oral healthcare is attracting much attention after decades of neglect from policymakers. Recent studies have shown a strong association between oral and overall health, which can lead to serious health problems. Availability of oral healthcare services is an essential part of ensuring universal healthcare coverage. More importantly, current gaps in its accessibility by minority or marginalized population groups are crucial public health as well as ethical concerns. One notable effort to address this issue comes from Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), which offer (...) oral healthcare services for non-insured refugees. However, the challenge remains that these care services are not comprehensive, which has implications for the refugees’ oral and general health. In this article, we discuss this complex issue in the German healthcare context by including ethical reflections. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to discuss the ethical challenges related to oral healthcare services provided by NGOs for refugees in Germany. First, we will introduce the general oral healthcare context worldwide and in Germany. Second, we will provide a general description of the oral healthcare services provided by NGOs for refugees in Germany, as well as an overview of existing gaps. This will provide us with the context for our third and most important task—discussing the ethical implications of the gaps. In doing so, and since the ethical implications can be several, we demarcate the scope of our analysis by focusing on the specific ethical issues of justice, harm, and autonomy. Finally, we offer some recommendations for how to move forward. (shrink)

There are few issues that have been as vexing for the Australian healthcare community as the Australian governments policy of mandatory, indefinite, immigration detention. While many concepts have been used to begin to describe the many dilemmas faced by healthcare professionals and their resolution, they are limited, perhaps most fundamentally by the fact that immigration detention is antithetical to health and wellbeing. Furthermore, and while most advice recognises that the abolition of detention is the only option in overcoming these issues, (...) it provides little guidance on how action within detention could contribute to this. Drawing on the work of political theorists and the broader sociological literature, we will introduce and apply a form of action that has not yet been considered for healthcare workers within detention, resistance. We will draw on several examples from the literature to show how everyday resistance could be enacted in healthcare and immigration detention settings. We argue that the concept of resistance has several conceptual and practical advantages over much existing guidance for healthcare workers in these environments, namely that it politicises care and has synergies with other efforts aimed at the abolition of detention. We also offer some reflections on the justifiability of such action, arguing that it is largely consistent with the existing guidance produced by all major healthcare bodies in Australia. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to the largest sudden global change to community life in living memory. Since being declared a pandemic in early 2020, there has been a growing body of evidence that h...