Bridget Pratt, from the Queensland Bioethics Centre at Australian Catholic University, has been recognised globally as a research leader in her field. Source: Catholic Health Australia.
In a Q&A interview with Catholic Health Australia, the Mater Associate Professor in Healthcare Ethics discussed the emerging bioethical issues for Catholic healthcare in Australia.
Dr Pratt was named in the latest 2024 Stanford University Elsevier Global Researcher list, as one of the top 2 per cent of applied ethics researchers in the world.
“Essentially, being on the list means that a lot of researchers worldwide are citing my publications, which means the ethics knowledge I’ve been generating through my research and with my collaborators is being used both by other ethicists and also by health researchers,” Dr Pratt said.
She said the recognition meant that she can “keep doing the work I’ve been doing, probably with a bit more confidence that it’s having a global impact and that the topics I’ve chosen to work on are relevant and important to study”.
Dr Pratt developed the Ethical Toolkit for Sharing Power in Priority-Setting for Health Research Projects, which aims to help academic researchers design processes that will make the health needs of communities, particularly disadvantaged and marginalised communities, more visible in health research projects’ topics and questions.
“The toolkit is needed because communities rarely have a say in the agendas of the very health research projects that aim to help them,” Dr Pratt said.
“And even where their participation occurs, without attention to power dynamics, it often leads to tokenism: presence without voice and voice without influence.”
Dr Pratt identified a number of emerging bioethical issues for Catholic health care in Australia.
“It is part of Catholic hospitals’ missions to address unmet needs and to promote environmental sustainability,” she said.
“Hospitals currently face resource allocation dilemmas, for example, around whether to invest in aspects of environmentally sustainable healthcare that cost more than business as usual. The tension is that doing so is seen to divert resources from healthcare’s main business of treating patients.
“Aged care also raises ethical questions – both for Catholic healthcare and more broadly – that I think are another key area of focus.”
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Queensland bioethicist wins global and national accolades (CHA)
