Dataset Information

Public attitudes toward allocating scarce resources in the COVID-19 pandemic.

ABSTRACT: The general public is subject to triage policies that allocate scarce lifesaving resources during the COVID-19 pandemic, one of the worst public health emergencies in the past 100 years. However, public attitudes toward ethical principles underlying triage policies used during this pandemic are not well understood. Three experiments (preregistered; online samples; N = 1,868; U.S. residents) assessed attitudes toward ethical principles underlying triage policies. The experiments evaluated assessments of utilitarian, egalitarian, prioritizing the worst-off, and social usefulness principles in conditions arising during the COVID-19 pandemic, involving resource scarcity, resource reallocation, and bias in resource allocation toward at-risk groups, such as the elderly or people of color. We found that participants agreed with allocation motivated by utilitarian principles and prioritizing the worst-off during initial distribution of resources and disagreed with allocation motivated by egalitarian and social usefulness principles. At reallocation, participants agreed with giving priority to those patients who received the resources first. Lastly, support for utilitarian allocation varied when saving the greatest number of lives resulted in disadvantage for at-risk or historically marginalized groups. Specifically, participants expressed higher levels of agreement with policies that shifted away from maximizing benefits to one that assigned the same priority to members of different groups if this mitigated disadvantage for people of color. Understanding these attitudes can contribute to developing triage policies, increase trust in health systems, and assist physicians in achieving their goals of patient care during the COVID-19 pandemic.

SUBMITTER: Buckwalter W

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7641460 | biostudies-literature | 2020

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Public attitudes toward allocating scarce resources in the COVID-19 pandemic.

Buckwalter Wesley W Peterson Andrew A

PloS one 20201104 11

The general public is subject to triage policies that allocate scarce lifesaving resources during the COVID-19 pandemic, one of the worst public health emergencies in the past 100 years. However, public attitudes toward ethical principles underlying triage policies used during this pandemic are not well understood. Three experiments (preregistered; online samples; N = 1,868; U.S. residents) assessed attitudes toward ethical principles underlying triage policies. The experiments evaluated assessm ...[more]

PMID: 33147213

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Project description:COVID-19 is a global pandemic that affected the everyday life activities of billions around the world. It is an unprecedented crisis that the modern world had never experienced before. It mainly affected the economic state and the health care system. The rapid and increasing number of infected patients overwhelmed the healthcare infrastructure, which causes high demand and, thus, shortage in the required staff members and medical resources. This shortage necessitates practical and ethical suggestions to guide clinicians and medical centers when allocating and reallocating scarce resources for and between COVID-19 patients. Many studies proposed a set of ethical principles that should be applied and implemented to address this problem. In this study, five different ethical principles based on the most commonly recommended principles and aligned with WHO guidelines and state-of-the-art practices proposed in the literature were identified, and recommendations for their applications were discussed. Furthermore, a recent study highlighted physicians' propensity to apply a combination of more than one ethical principle while prioritizing the medical resource allocation. Based on that, an ethical framework that is based on Fuzzy inference systems was proposed. The proposed framework's input is the identified ethical principles, and the output is a weighted value (per patient). This value can be used as a rank or a priority factor given to the patients based on their condition and other relevant information, like the severity of their disease status. The main idea of implementing fuzzy logic in the framework is to combine more than one principle when calculating the weighted value, hence mimicking what some physicians apply in practice. Moreover, the framework's rules are aligned with the identified ethical principles. This framework can help clinicians and guide them while making critical decisions to allocate/reallocate the limited medical resources during the current COVID-19 crisis and future similar pandemics.

Dataset Information

Public attitudes toward allocating scarce resources in the COVID-19 pandemic.

Publications

Public attitudes toward allocating scarce resources in the COVID-19 pandemic.

Similar Datasets

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