This fall, the Bioethics Department of the Lewis School of Health Science launched its new undergraduate bioethics minor at Clarkson. A National Endowment for the Humanities Connections grant supported the development of the minor and is sponsoring a speaker series to celebrate. The next speaker in the fall series, Janice Probst, MS, PhD will present a talk entitled, “Structured inequality: are rural health care gaps ethical?” this talk will examine how health care policy choices have outcomes that affect individuals differently across different geographies. Structuring care around persons, rather than communities, intrinsically disadvantages small places. This is compounded when program administration takes a “WNL” (“we never looked”) approach to evaluation of health outcomes.
Dr. Probst is a former Director of the Rural & Minority Health Research Center at the University of South Carolina. Across nearly 20 years of leading the R&MHRC, Dr. Probst designed and collaborated in research projects using a variety of metrics for identifying rural persons and places. Dr. Probst completed her undergraduate education at Duke University and her graduate training at Purdue University (MS) and the University of South Carolina (PhD). Recognition for her rural health work includes the “outstanding researcher” (2008) and “volunteer of the year” (2016) awards from the National Rural Health Association.