Lars Sandman

• PhD
• Professor at Linköping University

Priority setting of scarce resources in healthcare is high on the agenda of most healthcare systems implying a need to develop robust foundations for making fair allocation decisions. One central factor for such decisions in needs-based systems, following both empirical studies and theoretical analyses, is severity. However, it has been noted that...

The rise in the number of people on sick leave for common mental disorders is a growing concern, both from a societal and individual perspective. One common suggestion to improve the return-to-work process is increased cooperation between the relevant parties, including at least the employer, the social insurance agency and health care. This sugges...

In this article we discuss some ethically and legally controversial issues in the Swedish priority guidelines for intensive care during the recent covid pandemic. We show how the Swedish ethics platform for priority setting constitutes a robust starting point for such guidance, but that there is a lack of detail leaving some of the more challenging...

Background The use of policies in medical treatment reimbursement decisions, in which only future patients are affected, prompts a moral dilemma: is there an ethical difference between withdrawing and withholding treatment? Design Through a preregistered behavioral experiment involving 1,067 participants, we tested variations in public attitudes c...

When considering the introduction of a new intervention in a budget constrained healthcare system, priority setting based on fair principles is fundamental. In many jurisdictions, a multi-criteria approach with several different considerations is employed, including severity and cost-effectiveness. Such multi-criteria approaches raise questions abo...

The allocation of resources is a crucial part of political decision-making in healthcare, but explicit priorities are rarely set when resources are distributed. Two areas that have received some attention in research about legitimacy and priority-setting decisions in healthcare are the role of technical expert agencies as mediating institutions and...

Purpose This study aims to explore ethical challenges potentially arising from a problem-solving intervention with workplace involvement (PSI-WPI) in primary health care (with first-line manager involvement) for employees on sickness absence due to common mental disorders. Methods A qualitative design guided by the theoretical framework for system...

Evidence" is a key term in medicine and health services research, including Health Technology Assessment (HTA). Randomized clinical trials (RCTs) have undoubtedly dominated the scene of generating evidence for a long period of time, becoming the hallmark of evidence-based medicine (EBM). However, due to a number of misunderstandings , the lay audie...

Background: Severity plays an essential role in healthcare priority setting. Still, severity is an under-theorised concept. One controversy concerns whether severity should be risk- and/or time-sensitive. The aim of this article is to provide a normative analysis of this question. Methods: A reflective equilibrium approach is used, where judgeme...

It is uncontroversial to claim that the extent to which health care interventions benefit patients is a relevant consideration for health care priority setting. However, when effects accrue to the individual patient, effects of a more indirect kind may accrue to other individuals as well, such as the patient's children, friends, or partner. If, and...

The overarching aim of this article is to scrutinize how severity can work as a qualifier for the moral impetus of malady. While there is agreement that malady is of negative value, there is disagreement about precisely how this is so. Nevertheless, alleviating disease, injury, and associated suffering is almost universally considered good. Further...

The ethical discourse surrounding patients’ agential capacities, vis-à-vis their active participation in shared decision-making (SDM) in forensic psychiatric (FP) contexts, is an unexplored area of inquiry. The aim of this paper is to explore caregivers’ perceptions of patient agential capacities and institutional pathways and barriers to person ce...

Health technology assessment (HTA) aims, through empirical analysis, to shed light on the value of health technologies (O'Rourke et al. [2020, International Journal of Technology Assessment in Health Care 36, 187-90]). HTA is, then, where facts and values meet. But how, where, and when do facts and values meet in HTA? Currently, HTA is usually port...

Objectives: To conduct a formative evaluation of applying the VALIDATE approach in practice by (i) assessing how students appreciated the e-learning course, (ii) exploring how, for what purposes and with what outcomes the acquired VALIDATE competences subsequently were used in internships in different institutional contexts, and how this was shape...

Purpose: Identify ethical issues that arise in the coordination of return-to-work (RTW) among employees on sick leave due to common mental disorders (CMDs). Material and methods: 41 semi-structured individual interviews and one focus group interview with stakeholders (n = 46) involved in RTW: employees on sick leave due to CMDs, coordinators and...

Objectives Deliberative processes for health technology assessment (HTA) are intended to facilitate participatory decision making, using discussion and open dialogue between stakeholders. Increasing attention is being given to deliberative processes, but guidance is lacking for those who wish to design or use them. Health Technology Assessment Inte...

Objectives Deliberative processes for health technology assessment (HTA) are intended to facilitate participatory decision making, using discussion and open dialogue between stakeholders. Increasing attention is being given to deliberative processes, but guidance is lacking for those who wish to design or use them. Health Technology Assessment Inte...

Background Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) are among those regions most affected by the COVID-19 pandemic worldwide. The COVID-19 pandemic has strained health systems in the region. In this context of severe healthcare resource constraints, there is a need for systematic priority-setting to support decision-making which ensures the best use o...

Prioritization of COVID-19 vaccines is one of the most relevant topics in the current pandemic emergency. Prioritization decisions are political decisions that are value-laden, and as such of ethical nature. Despite the clear political and ethical nature of this topic, prioritization decisions are often interpreted and presented as scientific decis...

When people have equal claims to a non-divisible good, such as a life-saving drug or ventilator, a lottery procedure is sometimes used to ‘break the tie’ and determine who receives the good. However, within the context of healthcare resource allocation decisions, a lottery seems to do much more than provide a unique tie-breaking mechanism: it accou...

immediate breast reconstruction (iBR) is an integral part of modern breast cancer treatment. Our aim was to investigate patient experience with implant loss after iBR by using inter-pretative phenomenological analysis (iPa). We conducted semi-structured interviews with eight informants. We analyzed data according to the iPa flexible seven-stage pro...

The ethical discourse surrounding patients' agential capacities, vis-à-vis their active participation in shared decision-making (SDM) in forensic psychiatric (FP) contexts, is an unexplored area of inquiry. The aim of this paper is to explore caregivers' perceptions of patient agential capacities and institutional pathways and barriers to person ce...

One way to compare health care needs and outcomes on common scales is by estimating the strength of preferences or willingness-to-pay (WTP). The aim of this study was to review directly measured preference values and WTP estimates for health states treated by plastic surgery. The included articles had to meet the criteria defined in the SPIDER (Sam...

Intensive research is carried out to develop a disease-modifying drug for Alzheimer’s disease (AD). The development of drug candidates that reduce Aß or tau in the brain seems particularly promising. However, these drugs target people at risk for AD, who must be identified before they have any, or only moderate, symptoms associated with the disease...

Purpose To identify facilitators of and barriers to the coordination of return-to-work between the primary care services, the employee, and the employers from the perspective of coordinators and employees on sick leave due to common mental disorders (CMDs). Material and methods Descriptive qualitative study. Semi-structured interviews were conduct...

Background: Healthcare systems are increasingly struggling with resource constraints, given demographic changes, technological development, and citizen expectations. The aim of this article is to normatively analyze different suggestions regarding how publicly financed plastic surgery should be delineated in order to identify a well-considered, no...

In recent years, the issue of accepting a higher cost per health improvement for orphan drugs has been the subject of discussion in health care policy agencies and the academic literature. This article aims to provide an analysis of broadly egalitarian arguments for and against accepting higher costs per health improvement. More specifically, we ai...

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Caveat: The first posted pdf of this paper contained extensive misreferencing. Please download this updated version. Priority setting in health care is ubiquitous and health authorities are increasingly recognising the need for priority setting guidelines to ensure efficient, fair, and equitable resource allocation. While cost-effectiveness concer...

In a recent extended essay, philosopher Daniel Hausman goes a long way towards dismissing severity as a morally relevant attribute in the context of priority setting in healthcare. In this response, we argue that although Hausman certainly points to real problems with how severity is often interpreted and operationalised within the priority setting...

Immediate breast reconstruction (IBR) combined with post-mastectomy radiotherapy (PMRT) is associated with an increased risk for complications. Here, we analyse whether IBR combined with PMRT is ethically acceptable. We employ normative analysis following reflective equilibrium and the principles of Beauchamp and Childress: non-maleficence, benefic...

Dessa vägledande frågor är framtagna med syftet att utgöra ett stöd för att identifiera och reflektera kring etiska aspekter vid systematisk utvärdering av insatser inom det sociala området, dvs. socialtjänst och funktionshinderområdet. Syftet är att frågorna ska minska risken för att missa relevanta etiska aspekter avseende specifika insatser. Und...

Introduction Diagnoses related to common mental disorders such as anxiety, depression, adjustment disorders and stress-related disorders are one of the leading causes of long-term sick leave for both women and men in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries. To increase the rate of return-to-work workplace involvement in a c...

Background: Managers in elderly care have a complex ethical responsibility to address the needs and preferences of older persons while balancing the conflicting interests and requirements of relatives’ demands and nursing staff’s work environment. In addition, managers must consider laws, guidelines, and organizational conditions that can cause eth...

Debattartikel Dagens medicin https://www.dagensmedicin.se/artiklar/2019/05/17/kvalitetsindikatorer-bor-granskas-kritiskt/

In contrast to standardized guidelines, personalized medicine and person centered care are two notions that have recently developed and are aspiring for more individualized health care for each single patient. While having a similar drive toward individualized care, their sources are markedly different. While personalized medicine stems from a biom...

In health care priority setting different criteria are used to reflect the relevant values that should guide decision-making. During recent years there has been a development of value frameworks implying the use of multiple criteria, a development that has not been accompanied by a structured conceptual and normative analysis of how different crite...

In healthcare priority settings, early access to treatment before reimbursement decisions gives rise to problems of whether negative decisions for cost‐effectiveness reasons should result in withdrawing treatment, already accessed by patients. Among professionals there seems to be a strong attitude to distinguish between withdrawing and withholding...

Researchers have recently provided proof of concept for uterus transplantation, giving rise to a discussion about priority setting. This article analyses whether absolute uterine‐factor infertility (AUFI), the main indication for uterus transplantation, gives rise to a healthcare need and the extent to which such a need places justified claims on p...

Purpose: To examine how written communication between patients with hematological diseases and a nurse within a web-based communication service can be caring. Design: The study is based on qualitative deductive content analysis of 109 written messages between 10 patients and a responding nurse. The evaluated nursing intervention is a web-based c...

Background: Common mental disorders affect about one-third of the European working-age population and are one of the leading causes of sick leave in Sweden and other OECD countries. Besides the individual suffering, the costs for society are high. This paper describes the design of a study to evaluate a work-related, problem-solving intervention p...

In relation to the Swedish ethical platform for priority setting in health-care it is debated what role cost-effectiveness should play. In the article an ethical analysis is presented showing that a limited role risks leading to unequal priorities between similar needs in conflict with the human dignity and need-solidarity principles of the platfor...

The Swedish National HTA-organization, SBU, are responsible for assessments within the social services since 2015. In comparison with health-care, social services have somewhat different ethical values. SBU have developed an adapted guideline for identifying ethical aspects in projects on social services. In the presentation the guideline will be p...

According to European regulations and the legislations of individual member states, children who seek asylum have a different set of rights than adults in a similar position. To protect these rights and ensure rule of law, migration authorities are commonly required to assess the age of asylum seekers who lack reliable documentation, including thro...

Health technology assessment (HTA) is an evaluation of health technologies in terms of facts and evidence. However, the relationship between facts and values is still not clear in HTA. This is problematic in an era of “fake facts” and “truth production.” Accordingly, the objective of this study is to clarify the relationship between facts and value...

The importance for governments of establishing ethical principles and criteria for priority setting in line with social values, has been emphasised. The risk of such criteria not being operationalised and instead replaced by de-contextualised priority-setting tools, has been noted. The aim of this article was to compare whether citizenś views are i...

Background: Priority setting in publicly financed healthcare systems should be guided by ethical norms and other considerations viewed as socially valuable, and we find several different approaches for how such norms and considerations guide priorities in healthcare decision-making. Common to many of these approaches is that interventions are rank...

Background Health-care is permeated with ethical values and norms and so there are ethical implications to all interventions which changes practice, and this includes quality improvement (QI). The interest for ethics in QI so far has not had an explicit focus on the ethics of the actual improvement. Contrasting this with health technology assessmen...

Background When healthcare personnel take part in military operations in combat zones, they experience ethical problems related to dual loyalties, that is, when they find themselves torn between expectations of doing caring and military tasks, respectively. Aim This article aims to describe how Swedish healthcare personnel reason concerning everyd...

This chapter presents and analyses six ethical rationales for patient involvement in HTA. We have identified three instrumental and three substantive rationales, namely, (1) relevance to healthcare goals and healthcare needs, (2) legitimacy leading to adherence to decisions, (3) capacity building via patient empowerment, (4) fairness and legitimacy...

There is a strong patient demand for early access to potentially beneficial cancer drugs. In line with this authorization agencies like the European Medicines Agency are providing drugs with conditional market authorisation based on positive interim analyses. This implies that drugs are used with insecure evidence of efficacy and adverse side-effec...

Introduction: Assessment of ethics issues is an important part of health technology assessments (HTA). However, in terms of existence of quality assessment tools, ethics for HTA is methodologically underdeveloped in comparison to other areas of HTA, such as clinical or cost effectiveness. Objective: To methodologically advance ethics for HTA by: (1...

How to handle orphan drugs for rare diseases is a pressing problem in current health-care. Due to the group size of patients affecting the cost of treatment, they risk being disadvantaged in relation to existing cost-effectiveness thresholds. In an article by Niklas Juth it has been argued that it is irrelevant to take indirectly operative factors...

INTRODUCTION In formulating criteria for Health Technology Assessment (HTA) and priority setting a number of such criteria have been suggested and are used, for example in multi-criteria decision making. Besides taking central aspects like severity of disease, effectiveness, cost-effectiveness and patient safety into account, we also find reference...

Objectives: Although consideration of ethical issues is recognized as a crucial part of health technology assessment, ethics analysis for HTA is generally perceived as methodologically underdeveloped in comparison to other HTA domains. The aim of our study is (i) to verify existing tools for quality assessment of ethics analyses for HTA, (ii) to co...

The County Council's board for new therapies (the NT Council) provides recommendations on the use of new drugs based on the ethical platform of priorities, founded by the Swedish parliament. The Council has formulated a policy that interprets the parliamentary ethical platform and operationalize its need and solidarity principle and cost effectiven...

Shared decision-making and person centred care (PCC/SDM) are increasingly embraced framework conceptions on how to organise health care's interaction with patients. Although underlying ethical motivation may vary, PCC/SDM holds ideals of a greater adaption of health care to individual circumstances, and of recognising patients as collaborators in c...

Given health care resource constraints, voices are raised to hold patients responsible for their health-choices. In parallel, there is a growing trend towards shared decision-making, aiming to empower patients and give them more control over health care decisions. More power and control over decisions is usually taken to mean more responsibility fo...

Shared decision-making and person centred care (PCC/SDM) are increasingly embraced frameworks for how to organise health care’s continuous interaction with patients based on a personal narrative about their general life-situation facilitating greater adaption to individual circumstances and recognition of patients as collaborators in clinical decis...

In the editorial published in this journal, Daniels and colleagues argue that his and Sabin’s accountability for reasonableness (A4R) framework should be used to handle ethical issues in the health technology assessment (HTA)-process, especially concerning fairness. In contrast to this suggestion, it is argued that such an approach risks suffering...

Ethical values among managers in elderly care Bremer A, Jonasson LL & Sandman L. This session will report and discuss result from an ongoing study of managerial work, ethical values and preconditions in elderly care. A questionnaire with validated index (e.g. Managerial Ethical Profile, Gothenburg Manager Stress Inventory) and developed items was d...

Background Palliative carers constantly face ethical problems. There is lack of organised support for the carers to handle these ethical problems in a consistent way. Within organisational ethics, we find models for moral deliberation and for developing organisational culture; however, they are not combined in a structured way to support carers’ ev...

Objectives: Assessment of ethical aspects of a technology is an important component of health technology assessment (HTA). Nevertheless, how the implementation of ethical assessment in HTA is to be organised and adapted to specific regulatory and organisational settings remains unclear. The objective of this paper is to present a framework for syst...

Involuntary treatment is a key issue in healthcare ethics. In this study, ethical issues relating to involuntary psychiatric treatment are investigated through interviews with Swedish psychiatrists. In-depth interviews were conducted with eight Swedish psychiatrists, focusing on their experiences of and views on compulsory treatment. In relation to...

Decision-making capacity is a key concept in contemporary healthcare ethics. Previous research has mainly focused on philosophical, conceptual issues or on evaluation of different tools for assessing patients' capacity. The aim of the present study is to investigate how the concept and its normative role are understood in Swedish psychiatric care....

Det finns ett ökat intresse för patientinflytande i vården. Ett sådant fokus kan dock komma i konflikt med ett antal värden/praktiker inom vården. I denna artikel identifierar vi att följande värden/praktiker kan påverkas: Idén om patientens vårdbehov förefaller tappa sin moraliska och politiska ställning. Prioriteringar på gruppnivå kan bli sv...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to highlight the complexity surrounding the implementation of advanced electronic tracking, communication and emergency response technologies, namely, an extended safety and support (ESS) system for people with dementia (pwd) living at home. Results are presented from a Swedish demonstration study (2011-2012)...

An essential component of health technology assessment (HTA) is the assessment of ethical aspects. In some healthcare contexts, tasks are strictly relegated to different expert groups: the HTA-agencies are limited to assessment of the technology and other actors within the health care sector are responsible for appraisal and recommendations. Ethica...

Background Ambulance professionals often address conflicts between ethical values. As individuals’ values represent basic convictions of what is right or good and motivate behaviour, research is needed to understand their value profiles. Objectives To translate and adapt the Managerial Values Profile to Spanish and Swedish, and measure the presenc...

Objectives: The aim of this qualitative study is to explore the Swedish military personnel's experience of what it means to perform a caring role in a combat zone. This study assesses the challenges faced by military medical personnel in the context of a combat zone. Methods: The design was descriptive with a qualitative inductive approach. Twen...

Being critically ill with a hematological disease is a challenge, sometimes causing a need for support in the adjustment to the stressful life situation. By providing Web-based communication for support from a nurse, patients get access to an alternative and untraditional way to communicate their issues. The aim was to describe the meaning of using...

In this paper we explore the relation between health-care needs and patients' desires within shared decision-making (SDM) in a context of priority setting in health care. We begin by outlining some general characteristics of the concept of health-care need as well as the notions of SDM and desire. Secondly we will discuss how to distinguish between...

The aim of this study was to explore and suggest strategies for communicating via in-person interpreters, based on experiences of professional home care providers (i.e. nurses and nurse assistants) and social workers. Home care services with its multifaceted emphasis on physical, psychological, social aspects of care and focus on quality of life fo...

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to describe the prerequisites required for the provision and use of web-based communication for psychosocial support within a haematology clinic, from a patient and family perspective. Method: A qualitative design using content analysis was used. A strategically selected sample of patients (n = 11) and fami...

To describe the experiences of home care providers and social workers in communication, via in-person interpreters, with patients who do not share a common language, and to offer suggestions for practice based on this description. The use of interpreters is essential for successful communication to provide equal access to health care for patients n...

Out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) is a lethal health problem that affects between 236,000 and 325,000 people in the United States each year. As resuscitation attempts are unsuccessful in 70-98% of OHCA cases, Emergency Medical Services (EMS) personnel often face the needs of bereaved family members. Decisions to continue or terminate resuscitat...

In an article by Morten Dige in the Scandinavian Journal of Occupational Therapy, a value theory for occupational therapy is developed where the goals of occupational therapy, i.e. activity and participation, are seen as valuable in themselves. Such a value theory opens up for a paternalistic approach towards the person in need of occupational ther...

Ethical guidelines on out-of-hospital cardio-pulmonary resuscitation (CPR) are designed to provide substantial guidance for the people who have to make decisions and deal with situations in the real world. The crucial question is whether it is possible to formulate practical guidelines that will make things somewhat easier for ambulance personnel....

This paper presents a systematic account of ethical issues actualised in different areas, as well as at different levels and stages of health care, by introducing organisational and other procedures that embody a shift towards person centred care and shared decision-making (PCC/SDM). The analysis builds on general ethical theory and earlier work on...

It has been reported as an ethical problem within prehospital emergency care that ambulance professionals administer physiologically futile cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) to patients having suffered cardiac arrest to benefit significant others. At the same time it is argued that, under certain circumstances, this is an acceptable moral practic...

In recent years the formerly quite strong interest in patient compliance has been questioned for being too paternalistic and oriented towards overly narrow biomedical goals as the basis for treatment recommendations. In line with this there has been a shift towards using the notion of adherence to signal an increased weight for patients' preference...

2011:7 Att tillämpa den etiska plattformen vid ransonering

When patients suffer out-of-hospital cardiac arrests (OHCA), significant others find themselves with no choice about being there. After the event they are often left with unanswered questions about the life-threatening circumstances, or the patient’s death, or emergency treatment and future needs. When it is unclear how the care and the event itsel...

In patient-centred care, shared decision-making is advocated as the preferred form of medical decision-making. Shared decision-making is supported with reference to patient autonomy without abandoning the patient or giving up the possibility of influencing how the patient is benefited. It is, however, not transparent how shared decision-making is r...

The primary responsibility of prehospital emergency personnel at out-of-hospital cardiac arrests (OHCA) is to provide lifesaving care. Ethical considerations, decisions, and actions should be based in the patient's beliefs about health and well-being. In this article, we describe patients' experiences of surviving OHCA. By using a phenomenological...

In central definitions of shared decision-making within medical consultations we find the concept of negotiation used to describe the interaction between patient and professional in case of conflict. It has been noted that the concept of negotiation is far from clear in this context and in other contexts it is used both in terms of rational deliber...

In patient centred care, shared decision making is a central feature and widely referred to as a norm for patient centred medical consultation. However, it is far from clear how to distinguish SDM from standard models and ideals for medical decision making, such as paternalism and patient choice, and e.g., whether paternalism and patient choice can...