Pediatric and Neonatal Ethics, Policy, and Advocacy examines the ethical dilemmas, policy levers and advocacy strategies that shape clinical decision-making and system-level responses for children and newborns. This session convenes ethicists, clinicians, health-policy experts, legal advisors and advocacy leaders to explore topics such as resource allocation in NICUs and PICUs, consent and assent frameworks for minors, equity-driven policy design, and approaches to balancing parental rights with child best-interest determinations. Panels will unpack real-world ethical case studies—periviable resuscitation choices, withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment, access to high-cost gene therapies—and present frameworks for transparent, multidisciplinary decision-making that include ethics consultation, palliative involvement and culturally sensitive family engagement. Policy tracks will translate ethical principles into actionable advocacy: drafting position statements, shaping reimbursement policy to improve access for complex care, and designing regulations that protect children’s privacy while enabling clinically useful data-sharing.

Workshops will offer clinicians practical tools: structured ethics consultation scripts, decision-aid templates for complex consent discussions, and policy-advocacy playbooks that clinicians can adapt locally. Sessions will highlight legal nuances across jurisdictions—mandatory reporting, minor consent statutes, and the intersection of child protection and clinical care—and will provide sample policy language for institutional protocols. Equity and human-rights perspectives will examine how social determinants and systemic bias influence clinical options and access to cutting-edge therapies, and will propose concrete strategies to prioritise vulnerable populations in policy implementation. The programme also addresses workforce ethics: duty-to-care in epidemics, clinician wellbeing during moral distress, and institutional supports for staff facing ethically fraught decisions. Participants will leave with an ethics toolkit—checklists, consent templates, policy briefs and advocacy starter packs—to move from ethical reflection to concrete system change.