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After COVID-19: The Way We Die from Now On

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 December 2020

ANNA MAGDALENA ELSNER
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Abstract

Ethical issues raised by the outbreak of COVID-19 have predominantly been addressed through a public health ethics lens. This article proposes that the rising COVID-19 fatalities and the World Health Organization’s failure to include palliative care as part of its guidance on how to maintain essential health services during the pandemic have exposed palliative care as an underlying global crisis. It therefore calls for a different ethical framework that includes a care ethics perspective and thereby addresses the ways in which the pandemic has triggered new difficulties in ensuring the delivery of appropriate end-of-life care for the dying. The article analyses the structural weaknesses of palliative care accentuated by the pandemic and proposes solutions that could set in motion lasting changes in the way it is delivered beyond COVID-19.

Keywords

COVID-19end-of-life carepalliative carecare ethicsdying
Type
Special Section: Covid-19 Ethics: Principles and Policies
Information
Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics , Volume 30 , Issue 1 , January 2021 , pp. 69 - 72
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

Notes

1. Elias, N. The Loneliness of the Dying. Jephcott, E, trans. New York/London: Continuum; 2001 [1982], at 34.Google Scholar

2. For WHO guidance, see https://www.who.int/publications-detail/covid-19-operational-guidance-for-maintaining-essential-health-services-during-an-outbreak (last accessed 27 April 2020).

3. Editorial. Palliative care and the COVID-19 pandemic. The Lancet 2020;395:1168.

4. The term is borrowed from Berlinger, N. Are Workarounds Ethical? Managing Moral Problems in Health Care Systems. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5. Callahan, D. Death, mourning, and medical progress. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 2009;52:106.Google ScholarPubMed