Healthcare Workers are Walking Out Because of Predicted Pandemics

[firebrand]

National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly’s latest issue states that decisions regarding who would be treated in healthcare trials, having been predicted for quite a while concerning new viruses and SARS, is a moral issue and covers the aspects of the issue about under what conditions a worker could go home and when they should report for work, and different types of work during a pandemic.

 

[Dale_M]

Do you have a link for this article? I went to their website, but it appears that only a short abstract is available online:

The Duty to Care: When Health Care Workers Face Personal Risk

A pandemic due to the avian flu virus (H5N1) is possible, and if it occurs, the event will not be unfamiliar to health care workers. History provides us with numerous examples. In the twentieth century alone, there were three pandemics, the largest being the 1918 “Spanish” influenza pandemic, in which forty to fifty million people died worldwide within one year. Five hundred thousand persons died in the United States alone. Such crises have generated heroic responses by health care workers. The question that arises today is whether such heroism will prevail in the face of varying perceptions concerning the duty of health care workers to care.

[ncbcenter.metapress.com/app/home/contribution.asp?referrer=parent&backto=issue,2,9;journal,1,28;homema(name removed by moderator)ublications,1,2;](http://ncbcenter.metapress.com/app/...r=parent&backto=issue,2,9;journal,1,28;homema(name removed by moderator)ublications,1,2

 

[firebrand]

No, there are links within the article, but they are incomplete. I realize that you would have to subscribe, but then, I recommend NCBQ; they have some fine articles on controversial issues, human rights and prolife and are well worth a small investment!

 

[firebrand]

I have to apologize and admit that I carried on in the tradition of my namesake, firebrand. The article does not outright declare that workers are walking out per se; it does say that statistics indicate that much fewer workers would show up to work during a pandemic, but it does say that the pandemics are predicted, that medicines would initially be scarce, that there are serious ethical issues about kinds of treatment and for who during one, and that healthcare workers, nurses and others have been on the decline from 1970 to 1999.