Project Details

This dissertation aims to develop a model for the integration of ethics, empiricism, and health policy for a more equitable health care of overweight people in Germany. Existing models integrate ethics too little and focus on a combination of nutritional, sports, and behavioural therapy. Obesity is still widely regarded as a lifestyle-related disease for the prevention of which individuals are responsible. From an ethical perspective, however, the multifactorial causes (such as dietary culture, socio-economic status, education, or place of residence) of high body weight raises questions as to whether it can be justified to hold individuals solely responsible and whether prevailing measures exacerbate injustice, stigmatisation, and discrimination rather than creating equal health opportunities.

It is precisely this range of causes of high body weight that points to a complex system in which these influencing factors are mutually dependent. Individual interventions alone cannot solve this problem context. Rather, it requires the development of tools that cover a wide range of methods and incorporate complex systems approaches to support effective policy responses that can ultimately lead to more equitable healthcare.

The issue of high body weight is suitable for the development of an integrative model due to the complexity of the causes and its high social and health relevance. This is because high body weight has points of contact with almost all medical areas as well as care and prevention structures and can therefore be considered a public health paradigm.

In order to develop a model, a systematic review will first analyse which ethical approaches are currently being discussed concerning health equity for people with obesity. This will analyse what role the ethical concept of health equity already plays in the context of healthcare for people with obesity. Secondly, interviews with experts will provide insights into which theories of health equity are known in practice and which hurdles arise in the transfer of theory to practice. The experts should be recruited as evenly as possible from different medical and healthcare sectors. The results will be analysed and processed in a qualitative content analysis according to Kuckartz. This will be followed by a systematic analysis of international policies to prevent and reduce high body weight. This will help to understand what role theories of health equity already play in this context. In addition, existing policies will be ethically compared and evaluated.

By combining these studies and methods, a normative-based model is to be developed using the example of high body weight, which integrates the complexity of the topic and can be used in the future to develop and evaluate policies.