Investigating ethical tradeoffs in crisis standards of care through simulation of ventilator allocation protocols.

ABSTRACT:

Introduction

Arguments over the appropriate Crisis Standards of Care (CSC) for public health emergencies often assume that there is a tradeoff between saving the most lives, saving the most life-years, and preventing racial disparities. However, these assumptions have rarely been explored empirically. To quantitatively characterize possible ethical tradeoffs, we aimed to simulate the implementation of five proposed CSC protocols for rationing ventilators in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Methods

A Monte Carlo simulation was used to estimate the number of lives saved and life-years saved by implementing clinical acuity-, comorbidity- and age-based CSC protocols under different shortage conditions. This model was populated with patient data from 3707 adult admissions re

SUBMITTER: Herington J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11392394 | biostudies-literature | 2024

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature