COVID-19 Clinical Ethics Support (CCES)
A team led by Professor Huxtable is working on a rapid project, COVID-19 Clinical Ethics Support (CCES), kindly supported by the University’s Elizabeth Blackwell Institute. The team comprises Dr Birchley, Professor Ives, Dr Kennedy and Helen Smith from the Centre, working with Dr Peta Coulson-Smith, University of Southampton, with support provided by Dr Raj Mohindra and Professor Anne-Marie Slowther from the UK Clinical Ethics Network.
Exploring Professional Ethical Guidance
During the COVID-19 pandemic, a great deal of professional ethical guidance has been issued to health and social care professionals. This may help to inform decision-making with and for patients and other service users, but there is a risk that this guidance is inaccessible, that clinicians will face information overload, and it is an open question as to whether the guidance is clear, consistent and fair.
Our rapid review aims to identify, collate and summarise the guidance addressing COVID-19. Focusing particularly on health care, our central question asks:
What are the principles adopted by professional ethical guidance in England and Wales for dealing with COVID-19?
To answer our question, we will search for relevant professional ethical guidance, extract the ethical principles within these, and reflect on the similarities and differences between them.
So much ethical guidance is available from so many sources in the UK regarding the COVID-19 pandemic that it is bewildering to the clinical decision maker who wishes to practice ethically. Our work aims to encapsulate the principles of the guidance available into a useful and digestible format for clinical decision makers.
It has been fantastic to be part of this important piece of research which highlights the ethical issues raised during the COVID-19 pandemic and consider how clinicians can be supported to make ethical decisions in practice.
Exploring Ethical Perspectives
In addition to exploring professional ethical guidance, the project includes a rapid review of academic publications in the early phase of the pandemic. The aim is to ascertain what academics perceive to be ethically significant issues for health and social care professionals raised by the COVID-19 pandemic. The review will consist of searching academic databases and blogs for literature directly related to COVID-19 and identifying key themes, with a focus on clinical ethics in the UK and NHS. This work will complement the review of guidance and help to identify any gaps therein.
The CCES project presents an important opportunity to provide valuable and timely ethical insight into the COVID-19 pandemic, which will be practically relevant to healthcare professionals making care and treatment decisions during the pandemic, whilst also contributing to the wider academic discourse relating to clinical ethics in pandemics.
Publications
Coming soon...