Question

Biomedical ethics, chapter 21

Review a disaster plan for a healthcare facility. What is the focus of this disaster plan? On what type of ethical principles is this disaster plan based?

Answer 1

Healthcare facilities and their staff play a key role in emergency preparedness and response efforts for all types of events, including natural or man-made disasters, pandemic outbreaks, or terrorist attacks. Because the availability of healthcare is essential to accommodate the surge in demand for providing care related to a public health emergency, this website is intended to assist healthcare facilities in with all aspects of emergency planning, including mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery.

This web site is intended to provide basic tools and resources from federal governmental agencies, professional organizations, universities, and state and local public health agencies.

Most facilities have disaster plans and practice them, but don’t expect to ever carry out the plan. However, it is important to know before a disaster strikes who is in charge in the facility during and after the incident, who in your area is in charge, and what responsibilities you and your staff will have. Even with planning and practice, most facilities are neither ready nor prepared for a large-scale disaster.

Remember that although orderly drills are helpful, the disaster itself will not be orderly. Control as much as you can ahead of time. Plan for more disaster victims than you think you’ll ever receive. Plan that victims will arrive at all hospital entrances, and plan that collecting information will not be easy. Traditional admitting procedures will be impossible. Your facility should have a patient identification system that is simple and ready for use, enables tracking of the patients later by investigative authorities, and allows for the finding of the patients by relatives.

A disaster is an unplanned event in which the needs of the affected community outweigh the available resources. A disaster occurs somewhere in the world almost daily, but these events vary considerably in scope, size, and context. Large-scale disasters with numerous casualties are relatively unusual events.

Planning processes that include careful consideration of ethical principles for disasters and emergencies in long term facilities will assist staff in responding to crisis situations. activities should protect health and minimize the extent of death, injury, disease, disability, and suffering during an emergency.

The cardinal virtues of disaster response are prudence, courage, justice, stewardship, vigilance, resilience, self?effacing charity and communication. These eight virtues are not considered all inclusive, no more than Aristotle considered that his morals or virtues were all inclusive. Ongoing work in disaster management will help to ensure that such situations are managed in an ethical manner that respects the rights and privileges of all those involved.