You belong to your hospital’s COVID review
team; you are also the team’s liaison to the hospital’s ethics committee, to which you have belonged since ordinary, pre-pandemic times. Given that background, the chair of the COVID review team has tasked you with revising the hospital’s policy for the allocation of critical
care resources in a public health emergency like that we are now experiencing. As a first step, the chair has asked you: 1) to review both publicly available models and proposals in the medical ethics literature for what hospital
policies should be: and 2) to send an email to the team both recommending elements of the new policy and explaining the rationale for your recommendations. Write that email as this post. Question to consider include: Should the hospital seek to save not only the most lives,
but also the most life years? If so, when the demand for resources outstrips supply, should it be hospital policy to remove an older patient from a ventilator or an ICU bed in favor of a younger patient? Further, should front-line
healthcare workers be given priority, in view of their instrumental value in combating the public health emergency? Should research participants be given any priority? And so forth.
