Brendan Saloner, PhD

Brendan Saloner, PhD is a Bloomberg Associate Professor of American Health in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and core faculty in the Berman Institute of Bioethics. Prof. Saloner focuses on empirical and normative policy issues related to health care for socially marginalized populations, with a particular focus on people who use drugs and people involved with the criminal legal system. He received the Alice S. Hersh Emerging Leader Award from AcademyHealth and was the inaugural Greenwall Fellow in Bioethics at the National Academy of Medicine. Prof. Saloner received an early career award from the National Institute on Drug Abuse to study the impact of Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act on opioid use disorder treatment. He has also received grants from Arnold Ventures and Bloomberg Philanthropies, and he co-leads the evaluation team for the Bloomberg Overdose Prevention Initiative. In 2021, he received a Making A Difference Grant from The Greenwall Foundation to study health care resource allocation issues in jails and prisons in the context of COVID-19. Prof. Saloner is frequently cited in major media outlets including the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and NPR.

For more information, visit https://publichealth.jhu.edu/faculty/2929/brendan-saloner

Beyond Coercion: An Ethical Framework for Mandated Substance Use Treatment

Many people receive addiction treatment under a criminal legal mandate from courts, police, or community corrections. While coerced treatment is generally impermissible in health care because it violates patient autonomy, providers may justify collaborating in mandated treatment as a way to benefit patients who would otherwise face incarceration. This project will develop a novel ethics framework based on qualitative interviews with policymakers, providers, and formerly mandated patients. The grant will support the development of ethics-informed guidelines for programs and providers to manage the ethical tensions of participating in oversight and surveillance of mandated patients.