To Hire or Not to Hire: Smokers and the Workplace

Duration
90 Minutes
Speakers

David A. Asch, MD, MBA

Professor, Perelman School of Medicine and the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, Executive Director, Penn Medicine Center for Health Care Innovation, Philadelphia VA Medical Center

David A Asch, MD, MBA is Executive Director of the Penn Medicine Center for Health Care Innovation, a program that spans the University of Pennsylvania Health System and the Perelman School of Medicine and aims to advance their missions through the disciplined creation, evaluation, and implementation of change. He is Director of the RWJF Health & Society Scholars Program and Director of the RWJF Clinical Scholars Program at the University of Pennsylvania.

Dr. Asch’s research aims to understand and improve how physicians and patients make medical choices in clinical, financial, and ethically charged settings, including the adoption of new pharmaceuticals or medical technologies, the purchase of insurance, and personal health behaviors. His research combines elements of economic analysis with moral and psychological theory and marketing.

He teaches health policy at the Wharton School and he practices internal medicine at the Philadelphia Veterans Affairs Medical Center, where he created and from 2001 to 2012 directed the Center for Health Equity Research and Promotion. From 1998 to 2012 he was Executive Director of the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics.

Harald Schmidt, PhD

Assistant Professor, Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy, Research Associate, Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania

Harald Schmidt is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy and a Research Associate at the Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics, both at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine. His research interests are centered around personal responsibility for health, public health ethics and fairness in resource allocation. He has published in journals including the American Journal of Public Health, the New England Journal of Medicine, and the British Medical Journal. He completed his PhD in Health/Social Policy at the London School of Economics, and previously studied Philosophy at the Universities of Bremen, Oxford and Münster. In 2009-10 he was a Harkness Fellow in Health Care Policy and Practice at the Harvard School of Public Health, and for seven years served as an Assistant Director of the UK’s Nuffield Council on Bioethics, in London.

Webinar Objectives
  • Learn two opposing perspectives on the issue of not hiring smokers

  • Describe existing health care organizations’ policies on not hiring smokers

  • Examine the ethical considerations on not hiring smokers and why certain populations are affected the most by this policy

Additional Resources Cited in the Webinar