ABSTRACT
The current global pandemic raises myriad ethical issues for plastic surgeons. One not often discussed is that of an individual?s right to privacy when regarding health-related issues, the individual?s obligation to public health concerns, and the surgeon?s responsibility to their patients. Through a series of vignettes and discussion the nuances of those ethical responsibilities are explored.
ABSTRACT
A significant change for patients and families during SARs-CoV-2 has been the restriction of visitors for hospitalized patients. We analyzed SARs-CoV-2 hospital visitation policies and found widespread variation in both development and content. This variation has the potential to engender inequity in access. We propose guidance for hospital visitation policies for this pandemic to protect, respect, and support patients, visitors, clinicians, and communities.
Subject(s)
COVID-19/epidemiology , Hospital Administration , Organizational Policy , SARS-CoV-2 , Visitors to Patients , Family , HumansSubject(s)
Bioethics , Coronavirus Infections , Health Care Rationing , Pandemics , Pneumonia, Viral , Betacoronavirus , COVID-19 , Humans , SARS-CoV-2ABSTRACT
The response to the COVID-19 pandemic has necessitated a shift in how we apply the principles of biomedical ethics. The historical foundation of the ethical responsibility of the physician to the patient rests on the of that individual relationship. The patient comes first. However, in a pandemic, a public health ethics takes over, and the focus changes to what each individual member of society?s responsibility is to the collective. The greatest good for the greatest number trumps a given individual?s needs. Ethicists have focused primarily on creating guidelines that apply to allocating scarce life-and-death-determining resources. Very little attention has been paid to scarce resources that are more mundane, such as personal protective equipment (PPE) or operating room (OR) time. I present here a summary of the most recent ethical guidelines for allocation of scarce resources, note some concerns with these approaches, and discuss some of the shortcomings of applying these frameworks to the practice of craniofacial surgeons.