10th ICMM Military Medical Ethics Workshop 2020: "Medical Rules of Eligibility and Medical Care under Resource Scarcity"

Date: 05/07/2020 to 05/09/2020

Location:
Forum Lilienberg
Ermatingen (Switzerland)

Further information: https://melac.ch/courses-workshops/ethics-workshop/2020-lili...

Description: 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 equally encourage 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, we invite presentations that take the perspectives of both military and humanitarian health care providers.

Contact:
messelken@militarymedicalethics.ch

Organizer: Swiss Armed Forces, Medical Services Directorate; ICMM Center of Reference for Education on IHL and Ethics

Program coordination: Dr. phil. Daniel Messelken; Lt Col David Winkler, MD, PhD

Keywords: medical ethics