Medical Rules of Eligibility and Medical Care under Resource Scarcity (10th ICMM Workshop on Military Medical Ethics)

The ICMM Center of Reference for Education on IHL and Ethics in cooperation with the Medical Services Directorate of the Swiss Armed Forces and the ZH Center for Military Medical Ethics at Zurich University convene their joint

10th Workshop on Military Medical Ethics
26-28 April 2021 | ONLINE WORKSHOP (via zoom)

Medical Rules of Eligibility and Medical Care under Resource Scarcity

Topic

The questions according to which rules patients are admitted for treatment and which (potential) patient gets what kind of treatment in situations when medical resources are insufficient is a major source of ethical challenges – both for military and humanitarian health care providers. First, because resource scarcity is a feature common to many environments they are working in and ethical challenges related to it therefore often occur. Second, not being able to treat everybody in need necessarily leads to selecting one patient in favor of another one who will not get (a potentially life-saving) treatment. Being forced to not accept patients or even to send them away obviously causes ethical worries.

Even though resource scarcity is frequently encountered practical issue (hardly avoidable in many contexts) and dealing with it leads to ethical problems, there is no universal or generally satisfactory solution to it. We therefore propose to analyze different aspects of the topic and to exchange on experiences and regulations of different organizations, cultures, and contexts with the aim of better understanding the reasons for ethical troubles and to avoid (some of) them in the future.

To shed light at the topic from a variety of perspectives we will have field reports (e.g. case studies, experienc briefings, policy analyes) as well as philosophical papers and legal background analyses. In line with the tradition of the workshop series, presentations will include perspectives of both military and humanitarian health care providers.