The Ethical Challenges Faced by Healthcare Workers During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

This essay analyzes the ethical challenges that arise during crises in healthcare settings, drawing on an approach to healthcare ethics that stresses the importance of understanding ethical decision-making during healthcare delivery. Such situations profoundly challenge long-held ethical commitments and decisional procedures that have typically informed healthcare practices. Both the content and form of clinical care provision will be impacted by how clinicians, including medical practitioners, healthcare workers, and others, feel about the procedures deployed in healthcare delivery. Thus, the 'everyday or normal' healthcare setting contains important indices or evidence of how care providers may face moral decision-making in the depth of the healthcare system. Data relating to those facing these profoundly distressing decisions is virtually impossible to replicate in a standardized manner. What follows seeks to first provide a broad account of familiar ethical principles that have informed contemporary bioethics, before rethinking these categories through different crises that provoke reinvestigating human subjectivity and the practice of healthcare professionals. Subsequent sections will address four case studies to appreciate the new ethical challenges informing ethical decision-making within the context of the experience of pandemics and health crises. In facing a pandemic or other global health crisis, the values underpinning familiar ethical categories such as respect for autonomy, non-maleficence, beneficence, and justice, and upholding human rights as an absolute should be renegotiated. This essay will not address the difficulties that arise at a more general level in public health surveillance, public health policy, quarantine, or travel restrictions for non-infected people. The primary focus is on situations directly involving healthcare decision-making, that is, those caring for the sick. (Ayubi, 2021)