Healthcare Ethics Amid COVID-19

According to Emanuel et al (2020), the most extensive focus regarding the process of treatment impartation to COVID 19 viral strain affected patients within the UK has been concentrated on the conventional public health mechanisms involving the management of early outbreak situations. The two most significant methods, in this context, have been social distancing maintenance by the population and quarantining of the suspected and confirmed patients affected by the Corona virus. With the development of the pandemic, the health services at UK are certain to come under increasing pressure and this could entail the accordance of the initiative to individual professional health service providers to allocate potential life-saving medications to the patients. However, Power et al (2020) have observed that ethical contentions and issues would be required to be resolved at first regarding the proper execution of such responsibilities. In this context, Balla et al (2020) have highlighted that an ethical tension has been always in existence regarding the concern of health professionals about the welfare and health of the patients and the contentious issue pertaining to the maintenance of proper health conditions for the entire population. Involving the perilous pandemics such as the coronavirus infection, it is of paramount significance that the ethical balance of healthcare professionals, especially those of the doctors, should be reoriented towards the utilitarian objective of executing equitable concern for each patient. According to Shi et al (2020), the 2009 ethical framework which had been revised during 2017, pertaining to decision formulation aspects involving strategic choices which have to be factored in while providing the ethical compass through which the provisioning of medical services during pandemic emergencies could be performed. The primary guiding principles are as the following:

1: Equal measure of respect: Though it could be understood that everyone could matter equally, it is not possible to accord equal significance in terms of treatment to everyone since conditional differentiations would persist.

2: Fairness: It could be argued that people with equitable opportunity to benefit from any resource would be entitled to equal measures of such benefits. However, the scope of the pandemic has driven home the fact that it would never be unfair for practitioners to request people to wait if they have the conditions which could permit such reasonable delays since the entire population has to be cared for.

3: Reciprocity: It is necessary to support those who agree to perform the most demanding tasks as health professionals. This could as well be interpreted as the necessity to operate in a proportionate measure.

Though it is improbable that everyone could fall ill simultaneously, the individual phases of illnesses are rapid enough. In such circumstances, application of strict utilitarian considerations would have to be performed since demand could outstrip the healthcare delivery capacity of the NHS. The objective would be to maximise the overall benefit. In this context, health professionals would be required to implement policies under which denial off intensive treatment to some patients would be probable on various logical grounds such as enabling treatment to other patients who could demonstrate higher survivability than those who could be estimated to be unrecoverable pathologically. The ethical perspectives would be guided by professional prognosis of the conditions of such patients.

Reference List

Balla, M., Merugu, G.P., Patel, M., Koduri, N.M., Gayam, V., Adapa, S., Naramala, S. and Konala, V.M., 2020. COVID-19, Modern Pandemic: A Systematic Review From a Front-Line Health Care Providers’ Perspective. Journal of Clinical Medicine Research, 12(4), pp.215-229.

Emanuel, E.J., Persad, G., Upshur, R., Thome, B., Parker, M., Glickman, A., Zhang, C., Boyle, C., Smith, M. and Phillips, J.P., 2020. Fair allocation of scarce medical resources in the time of Covid-19.

Power, M., Doherty, B., Pybus, K. and Pickett, K., 2020. How Covid-19 has exposed inequalities in the UK food system: The case of UK food and poverty. Emerald Open Research, 2(11), p.11.

Shi, Y., Wang, Y., Shao, C., Huang, J., Gan, J., Huang, X., Bucci, E., Piacentini, M., Ippolito, G. and Melino, G., 2020. COVID-19 infection: the perspectives on immune responses.