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 […]
Category: Journal of Medical Ethics
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 […]
Personal Protective Equipment for front-line health workers: an ethical imperative
By Elizabeth Fenton Covid-19 poses risks to health care workers that exceed those posed to members of the public. Repeated exposure to infected patients increases their risk of infection, and might also make their symptoms more severe if they become infected. Although reported numbers vary, in Italy approximately 9% of COVID-19 cases are health workers, […]
Scarce resources allocation in the COVID-19 outbreak: Extraordinary framework, ordinary criteria
By Chiara Mannelli. After initially emerging in China, the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak has advanced rapidly. The World Health Organization has declared it a pandemic, with Europe becoming its new epicenter. Demand for critical care currently exceeds its supply, raising significant ethical concerns, among which is the allocation of scarce resources. Professionals are considering the prioritization […]
The Slow Dragon and the Dim Sloth: What can the world learn from coronavirus responses in Italy and the UK?
By Marcello Ienca and David Shaw. Italy and the UK arguably represent the two extremes of initial policy responses to the ongoing Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak. In the following we provide an overview of these response strategies and discuss what the rest of the world can learn from these two countries. Chaotically draconian: The Italian […]
Don’t let the ethics of despair infect the intensive care unit
By David Shaw, Dan Harvey and Dale Gardiner. Coronavirus is a killer, and most countries have implemented measures to reduce this mortality. On the one hand, public health measures aim to limit the spread of the disease, and hence limit the number of people requiring hospitalisation; on the other, healthcare professionals working in intensive care […]
COVID-19 and the Moral Community: A Nursing Ethics Perspective
By Georgina Morley. Effective triage and allocation of resources based on clinically and ethically supportable criteria is undoubtedly the correct way to respond to COVID-19 as we aim to mitigate the effects and likely unprecedented impact this novel virus will have on healthcare systems across the globe. However, as some commentators have overlooked, the burden […]
Clinical ethics in a public health crisis: supporting our clinician colleagues at the frontline
By Rosalind McDougall. Clinical ethicists around the world are responding to COVID-19 in an effort to support our clinician colleagues at the frontline. The clinical ethics community is compiling resources, developing ethical guidelines, and contributing to hospital policy as the scale of the crisis increases. The hope is that ethics can offer a structured way […]
COVID-19 pandemic
Ernest Hemingway understood courage to be “grace under pressure” and doctors, nurses and health care professionals have been profoundly courageous in the face of the Covid 19 pandemic. It is too early for philosophical or scholarly reflection upon this crisis, the priority should be to find a path through it and for those of us […]