Journal article
‘Your country needs you’: the ethics of allocating staff to high-risk clinical roles in the management of patients with COVID-19
- Abstract:
- As the COVID-19 pandemic impacts on health service delivery, health providers are modifying care pathways and staffing models in ways that require health professionals to be reallocated to work in critical care settings. Many of the roles that staff are being allocated to in the intensive care unit and emergency department pose additional risks to themselves, and new policies for staff reallocation are causing distress and uncertainty to the professionals concerned. In this paper, we analyse a range of ethical issues associated with changes to staff allocation processes in the face of COVID-19. In line with a dominant view in the medical ethics literature, we claim, first, that no individual health professional has a specific, positive obligation to treat a patient when doing so places that professional at risk of harm, and so there is a clear ethical tension in any reallocation process in this context. Next, we argue that the changing asymmetries of health needs in hospitals means that careful consideration needs to be given to a stepwise process for deallocating staff from their usual duties. We conclude by considering how a justifiable process of reallocating professionals to high-risk clinical roles should be configured once those who are ‘fit for reallocation’ have been identified. We claim that this process needs to attend to three questions that we consider in detail: (1) how the choice to make reallocation decisions is made, (2) what justifiable models for reallocation might look like and (3) what is owed to those who are reallocated.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
Actions
Access Document
- Files:
-
-
(Preview, Version of record, 302.0KB, Terms of use)
-
- Publisher copy:
- 10.1136/medethics-2020-106284
Authors
- Publisher:
- BMJ Publishing Group
- Journal:
- Journal of Medical Ethics More from this journal
- Volume:
- 46
- Issue:
- 7
- Pages:
- 436-440
- Publication date:
- 2020-05-14
- Acceptance date:
- 2020-05-04
- DOI:
- EISSN:
-
1473-4257
- ISSN:
-
0306-6800
- Language:
-
English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
-
1102837
- Local pid:
-
pubs:1102837
- Deposit date:
-
2020-05-05
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Dunn et al.
- Copyright date:
- 2020
- Rights statement:
- This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported (CC BY 4.0) license, which permits others to copy, redistribute, remix, transform and build upon this work for any purpose, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the licence is given, and indication of whether changes were made. See: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
If you are the owner of this record, you can report an update to it here: Report update to this record