As doctors and hospitals continue to face critical decisions in the care of COVID-19 patients, there is concern that legislation giving legal protections for crisis care will also bring about discrimination against disabled people and racial and ethic groups that have suffered systemic health care disparities.
Dr. Robert Klitzman, a psychiatrist and director of the Bioethics program at the School of Professional Studies, recently spoke with KCUR, a National Public Radio affiliate in Kansas City, Missouri, about how to combat that kind of discrimination, advocating for the use of objective criteria in triage guidelines for COVID-19 patients.
In other words, we look at kidney function based on lab values. We look at functioning of the pancreas. We look at how the heart is functioning. We look at whether the patient is in coma. These are objective measures of sequential organ failure, of several organs not working.
Criteria such as these would not take into account a patient's ethnic, racial, socioeconomic or insurance status. Klitzman also noted, however: "You have groups that are very worried to begin with and will see this as giving doctors license to just not treat them. So you want to make sure that the kind of objective assessments and processes we’re talking about are communicated in a fair way.”
Read the full article on KCUR's website and learn more about the Bioethics program here.
