Visitor restrictions in hospitals during infectious disease outbreaks: An ethical approach to policy development and requests for exemptions
Bioethics(2023)
摘要
In this paper, we explore the ethics of restricting visitation to hospitals during an infectious disease outbreak. We aim to answer three questions: What are the features of an ethically justified hospital visitor restriction policy? Should policies include scope for case-by-case exemptions? How should decisions about exemptions be made? Based on a critical interpretive review of the existing ethical literature on visitor restrictions, we argue that an ethically justified hospital visitor restriction policy has the following features: proportionality, comprehensiveness, harm mitigation, exemptions for specific patient populations, visitation decisions made separately from a patient's treating clinicians, transparency, and consistency in application. We also argue that an ethical policy ought to include scope for case-by-case exemptions for individual patients. We propose a process for ethical decision-making that provides a shared language and structure to decrease the risks and burdens of decision-making when clinicians or managers are considering requests for exemptions.
更多查看译文
关键词
clinical ethics,COVID,infectious disease,organizational ethics,policy,visitor restrictions
AI 理解论文
溯源树
样例
生成溯源树,研究论文发展脉络
Chat Paper
正在生成论文摘要