Italy now has more than 10,000 cases of the coronavirus and hospitals have been overwhelmed.
I posted on this yesterday: Coronavirus update from Italy - hospitals overwhelmed, not treating all other emergencies
In the face of this disastrous emergency the Italian College of Anesthesia, Analgesia, Resuscitation and Intensive Care (SIAARTI) has published guidelines for the criteria that doctors and nurses should follow:
- document begins by likening the moral choices facing Italian doctors to the forms of wartime triage that are required in the field of "catastrophe medicine."
- not all patients who need intensive care will receive it
- its necessary instead to follow "the most widely shared criteria regarding distributive justice and the appropriate allocation of limited health resources."
- "Informed by the principle of maximizing benefits for the largest number," they suggest that "the allocation criteria need to guarantee that those patients with the highest chance of therapeutic success will retain access to intensive care."
- "It may become necessary to establish an age limit for access to intensive care."
