Joar Røkke Fystro

Academic interests

• Health ethics in general, but particularly
  • the use of (financial) incentives,
  • (personal) responsibility within health policy, and
  • the health service's responsibility to inform relatives at risk of hereditary disease.

The PhD project

My PhD project is about non-attendance fines in the health service. When people do not attend appointments in outpatient clinics, time and resources which could have benefited other patients will go to waste. The purpose of the fine is to reduce non-attendance, and today you can be charged 1125 NOK (approximately 109 EUR) in Norway if you do not show up as agreed.

To dig deeper into the normative foundation of non-attendance fines, I will first conduct a document analysis of pertinent public documents, including consultations responses: how is the fine described from the 1990s and onwards, and what are the arguments for and against a non-attendance fine? Thereafter, an experimental study will be carried out, where people’s intuitions and opinions about non-attendance fines are measured through a questionnaire. Last but not least, a theoretical paper will systemize and discuss the normative foundation(s) of non-attendance fines. This project aims to shed new light on the practice of non-attendance fines.

Background

• Master of Philosophy in Interdisciplinary Health Sciences (2020), University of Oslo
• Bachelor's degree in Physiotherapy (2017), OsloMet – Oslo Metropolitan University
• Bachelor's degree in Social Work (2014), OsloMet – Oslo Metropolitan University