73 – The Ethics of Healthcare Prioritisation during COVID 19

Algocracy and Transhumanism Podcast

We have a limited number of ventilators? Who should get access to them? In this episode I talk to Lars Sandman. Lars is a Professor of Healthcare Ethics at Linköping University, Sweden. Lars’s research involves studying ethical aspects of distributing scarce resources within health care and studying and developing methods for ethical analyses of health-care procedures. We are going to be talking about the ethics of healthcare prioritisation in the midst of the COVID 19 pandemic, focusing specifically on some principles Lars, along with others, developed for the Swedish government.

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Show Notes

• The prioritisation challenges we currently face
• Ethical principles for prioritisation in healthcare
• Problems with applying ethical theories in practice
• Swedish legal principles on healthcare prioritisation
• Principles for access to ICU during the COVID 19 pandemic
• Do we prioritise younger people?
• Chronological age versus biological age
• Could we use a lottery principle?
• Should we prioritise healthcare workers?
• Impact of COVID 19 prioritisation on other healthcare priorities

Relevant Links

• Lar’s Webpage
• Swedish Legal Principles
• Background to the Swedish Law
• New priority principles in Sweden (English Translation by Christian Munthe)
• “Principles for allocation of scarce medical interventions” by Persad, Werthheimer and Emanuel (good overview of the ethical debate)
• The grim ethical dilemma of rationing medical care, explained – Vox.com