Medical Ethics During a Public Health Crisis: COVID-19

Navigating our way through a hospital ransomware attack: ethical considerations in delivering acute orthopaedic care

Ransomware attacks on healthcare systems are becoming more prevalent globally. In May 2021, Waikato District Health Board in New Zealand was devastated by a major attack that crippled its information technology system. The Department of Orthopaedic Surgery faced a number of challenges to the way they delivered care including, patient assessment and investigations, the deferral of elective surgery, and communication and patient confidentiality. These issues are explored through the lens of the four key principles of medical ethics in the hope that they will provide some guidance to future departments who may experience such attacks.

Perception of healthcare workers towards ethical aspects of responsiveness of COVID 19 outbreak: A cross-sectional study

Introduction:

COVID-19 has spread all over the world and most of the countries are still grappled with the Pandemic. Health-care-workers (HCWs) being the frontlines during such pandemics have different beliefs and faiths with regards to ethical aspects of preparations.

Methodology:

In order to study the perception of HCW about ethical aspects of COVID-19, a cross-sectional study was done in a tertiary-care-teaching hospital. A pretested questionnaire was circulated among the participants on a digital platform.

Results:

The HCWs were divided over many statements, like if COVID-19 was more hype than reality (45.77% disagreed and 43.25% agreed). 57.44% of participants either agreed or strongly agreed that the treatment of non-COVID-19 cases suffered due to arrangements made for COVID-19 cases. When the responses received against individual statements were compared with various other socio-demographic variables as a denominator, various interesting results were revealed. There was a significant difference of opinion among the participating HCWs (P < 0.05).

Conclusion:

Differences of the opinions had their relationships to demographic characteristics of the subjects as well as related to perceived knowledge of COVID-19.