Staffing crisis capacity: a different approach to healthcare resource allocation for a different type of scarce resource.

ABSTRACT: Severe staffing shortages have emerged as a prominent threat to maintaining usual standards of care during the COVID-2019 pandemic. In dire settings of crisis capacity, healthcare systems assume the ethical duty to maximise aggregate population-level benefit of existing resources. To this end, existing plans for rationing mechanical ventilators and intensive care unit beds in crisis capacity focus on selecting individual patients who are most likely to survive and prioritising these patients to receive scarce resources. However, staffing capacity is conceptually different from availability of these types of discrete resources, and the existing strategy of identifying and prioritising patients with the best prognosis cannot be readily adapted to fit this real-world scenario. We propose that

SUBMITTER: Butler CR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9844994 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature