As health care services worldwide undergo major reconfiguration to respond to the coronavirus crisis, there are simple and affordable ways to improve outcomes that relate to both HIV and COVID-19 care. The first step is to make sure that the HIV status is recorded on all hospital admissions relating to COVID-19. This in turn will […]
Month: April 2020
Ensuring personalised care for pregnant women during COVID-19
During a period of lockdown where many of our basic freedoms have been limited, the autonomy and safety of pregnant women can easily be overlooked. In a blogpost last week, Anna Nelson and Chloe Romanis discussed concerns raised about the availability of home birthing during the COVID-19 lockdown. I spoke with Sarah Noble, Head of […]
Smokeless tobacco use and the COVID-19 pandemic
The use of tobacco products is of particular concern during the COVID-19 pandemic. Head and neck surgeons Dr Arjun Singh and Dr Pankaj Chaturvedi argue that smokeless tobacco use requires attention to help stop the spread of the disease. Since late 2019, the world has witnessed the spread of a pandemic affecting the respiratory […]
Smoking history is an important risk factor for severe COVID-19
Giuseppe Gorini, Luke Clancy, Esteve Fernandez and Silvano Gallus Current evidence suggests that an association exists between smoking and COVID-19 severity, in line with recent research which has shown that smoking is associated with increased risk of acute respiratory distress syndrome. Moreover, a study based on 1099 COVID-19 patients showed that 31.7% of patients […]
COVID-19: In focussing on intensive care we must not lose sight of the wider professional duty to care for all patients.
By Anne Slowther and Sara Mitchell As the number of cases and number of deaths from COVID-19 continues to rise exponentially much of the health care response, and subsequent bioethics commentary, has focussed on provision of intensive care for critically ill patients who require ventilation. This is understandable given the mismatch between the number of people […]
Ethical rationing: Hydroxychloroquine, COVID-19 and the inequality of diseases
By Yves Saint James Aquino and Nicolo Cabrera The controversy surrounding the off-label use of hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) for COVID-19 highlights the inherent inequality of disease conditions. In this brief ethics explainer, we argue that we need to make explicit the clinical and non-clinical factors that determine the inequality of diseases. The varying appraisals of disease […]
The vital contexts of coronavirus
By David Shaw The coronavirus pandemic has taken over all our lives, confining most people to their homes and killing tens of thousands around the world. Every day we are updated on the latest infection rates and mortality figures, and speculate about how long the lockdown will last. Yet what is missing from much of […]
Responding to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic: Experiences of an ad hoc public health ethics consultation
By Verina Wild, Alena Buyx, Samia Hurst, Christian Munthe, Annette Rid, Daniel Strech, Alison Thompson. Clinical ethics consultations are a well established method to deal with ethically problematic situations in clinical care, even in emergency situations. But an emergency public health ethics consultation? This was unusual for most of us. Public health authorities in many […]
Health Care Professionals Are Under No Ethical Obligation to Treat COVID-19 Patients
By Udo Schuklenk. Even a cursory look at the news tells us that many doctors and nurses are reluctant to provide care to COVID-19 patients. Personal protective equipment (PPE) levels in Australia’s state of Queensland are very low, writes the state’s Clinical Senate Chair Alex Markwell. Bulgaria has seen a wave of doctors resigning, Zimbabwean […]
Your family or your job? Balancing the duty to treat with the duty to family in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic
By Doug McConnell At an aged-care home in Australia, most of the social care workers abstained from work after a COVID-19 outbreak at the facility. They cited concern for their family members, some of whom were immunocompromised. Physicians and nurses in the UK have threatened to quit because a lack of adequate personal protective equipment […]