Dataset Information

Pre-pandemic planning survey of healthcare workers at a tertiary care children's hospital: ethical and workforce issues.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Prior to the development of written policies and procedures for pandemic influenza, worker perceptions of ethical and workforce issues must be identified.

Objective

To determine the relationship between healthcare worker (HCW) reporting willingness to work during a pandemic and perception of job importance, belief that one will be asked to work, and sense of professionalism and to assess HCW's opinions regarding specific policy issues as well as barriers and motivators to work during a pandemic.

Methods

A survey was conducted in HCWs at The Children's Hospital in Denver, Colorado, from February to June 2007. Characteristics of workers reporting willingness to work during a pandemic were compared with those who were unwilling or unsure. Importance of barriers and motivators was compared by gender and willingness to work.

Results

Sixty percent of respondents reported willingness to work (overall response rate of 31%). Belief one will be asked to work (OR 4.6, P < 0.0001) and having a high level of professionalism (OR 8.6, P < 0.0001) were associated with reporting willingness to work. Hospital infrastructure support staffs were less likely to report willingness to work during a pandemic than clinical healthcare professionals (OR 0.39, P < 0.001). Concern for personal safety, concern for safety of family, family's concern for safety, and childcare issues were all important barriers to coming to work.

Conclusions

Educational programs should focus on professional responsibility and the importance of staying home when ill. Targeted programs toward hospital infrastructure support and patient and family support staff stressing the essential nature of these jobs may improve willingness to work.

SUBMITTER: Cowden J

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4940933 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:The field of public health includes a wide scope of activities and professional disciplines, ranging from sanitation, health protection, epidemiology, environmental health, financing, health promotion, including supervision, or the provision of clinical care. Each of these disciplines works in systems that face ethical dilemmas, making it important that public health workers have motivation to understand and practice within the ethical guidelines of their profession, thus making ethics an important component of training and practice. The dangers of ethical lapses are overwhelmingly apparent in the case of the Eugenics movement of the early 20th century which metamorphosed from forced sterilizations in many liberal democratic countries into mass murder of physically and mentally handicapped children and adults in Nazi Germany. Between 1939 and 1941, 180 thousand psychiatric patients along with an equivalent number of handicapped children and adults were killed in an organized extermination program in Germany by lethal gassing. This method was then applied to the industrialized murder or Holocaust of six million Jews and millions of other “untermenschen” (sub human) in the greatest genocide in human history. Shortly after World War II ended the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi war criminals were conducted including medical doctors, and some were executed for crimes against humanity. This was followed by the 1948 United Nations Declaration on Human Rights and by the World Medical Association’s Helsinki Declaration. Both are widely accepted as cornerstone documents—the latter specifically governing ethical standards related to human experimentation—and are revised regularly since being issued in 1964. But genocide has not disappeared, nor has unscrupulous experimentation such as the Tuskegee experiment on black Americans infected with syphilis and left untreated even after the availability of a cure, penicillin. Ethical standards are now required by “Helsinki Committees”—ethical review boards—in most medical facilities worldwide. Ethical frameworks have evolved in part due to bitter experience of ethical failures later recognized and affecting public health standards of practice. Future generations of public health leaders and staff will face many ethical issues such as mandatory immunization of health workers and school children, and assisted death of terminally ill patients.