PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Donna T Chen
AU  - Lois Shepherd
AU  - Jordan Taylor
AU  - Mary Faith Marshall
TI  - Who will receive the last ventilator: why COVID-19 policies should not prioritise healthcare workers
AID  - 10.1136/medethics-2021-107248
DP  - 2021 Jun 24
TA  - Journal of Medical Ethics
PG  - medethics-2021-107248
4099  - http://jme.bmj.com/content/early/2021/06/25/medethics-2021-107248.short
4100  - http://jme.bmj.com/content/early/2021/06/25/medethics-2021-107248.full
AB  - Policies promoted and adopted for allocating ventilators during the COVID-19 pandemic have often prioritised healthcare workers or other essential workers. While the need for such policies has so far been largely averted, renewed stress on health systems from continuing surges, as well as the experience of allocating another scarce resource—vaccination—counsel revisiting the justifications for such prioritisation. Prioritising healthcare workers may have intuitive appeal, but the ethical justifications for doing so and the potential harms that could follow require careful analysis. Ethical justifications commonly offered for healthcare worker prioritisation for ventilators rest on two social value criteria: (1) instrumental value, also known as the ‘multiplier effect’, which may preserve the ability of healthcare workers to help others, and (2) reciprocity, which rewards past usefulness or sacrifice. We argue that these justifications are insufficient to over-ride the common moral commitment to value each person’s life equally. Institutional policies prioritising healthcare workers over other patients also violate other ethical norms of the healthcare professions, including the commitment to put patients first. Furthermore, policy decisions to prioritise healthcare workers for ventilators could engender or deepen existing distrust of the clinicians, hospitals and health systems where those policies exist, even if they are never invoked.