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What Do You Do When You Can Do No More? Limited Resources, Unimaginable Environments, Personal Danger: What Have Previous Disasters Taught Us About Moral and Ethical Challenges?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 April 2023

Stephanie Smith  and
Jessica Kuipers Open the ORCID record for Jessica Kuipers [Opens in a new window]
Stephanie Smith
Affiliation:
Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John’s, Canada Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada
Jessica Kuipers*
Affiliation:
Independent Scholar
*
Corresponding author: Jessica Kuipers, Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Historically, natural and manmade disasters create many victims and impose pressures on health-care infrastructure and staff; potentially hampering the provision of patient care and overloading clinician capacity. Throughout the course of history, clinicians have performed heroics to work well above their required duty, despite limitations, even putting their own health and safety at risk. In times when clinicians needed to either physically abandon patients or consider abandoning active treatment, we have seen extreme hesitancy to do so, fearing that they may be giving up too soon, that undue harm may come to patients, or even feeling unsure of legal or moral burdens that may ensue. In times when clinicians are placed in this unimaginable position, feeling isolated and overwhelmed, it is essential that they be supported and provided with resources to standardize decision-making.

Type
Concepts in Disaster Medicine
Information
Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness , Volume 17 , 2023 , e373
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Society for Disaster Medicine and Public Health, Inc.

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