Roadevin, C. and Hill, H. orcid.org/0000-0002-0908-5595 (2021) How can we decide a fair allocation of healthcare resources during a pandemic? Journal of Medical Ethics, 47 (12). e84. ISSN 0306-6800
Abstract
Whenever the government makes medical resource allocation choices, there will be opportunity costs associated with those choices: some patients will have treatment and live longer, while a different group of patients will die prematurely. Because of this, we have to make sure that the benefits we get from investing in treatment A are large enough to justify the benefits forgone from not investing in the next best alternative, treatment B. There has been an increase in spending and reallocation of resources during the COVID-19 pandemic that may have been warranted given the urgency of the situation. However, these actions do not bypass the opportunity cost principle although they can appear to in the short term, since spending increases cannot continue indefinitely and there are patient groups who lose out when resources are redirected to pandemic services. Therefore, policy-makers must consider who bears the cost of the displaced healthcare resources. Failure to do so runs a risk of reducing overall population health while disproportionally worsening health in socially disadvantaged groups. We give the example of ethnic minorities in England who already had the worst health and, due to structural injustices, were hardest hit by the pandemic and may stand to lose the most when services are reallocated to meet the resource demands of the crisis. How can we prevent this form of health inequity? Our proposal is forward-looking: we suggest that the government should invest our resources wisely while taking issues of equity into account–that is, introduce cost–equity analysis.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2021. No commercial re-use. This is an author-produced version of a paper subsequently published in Journal of Medical Ethics. This version is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial Licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. You may not use the material for commercial purposes. |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health (Sheffield) > School of Health and Related Research (Sheffield) > ScHARR - Sheffield Centre for Health and Related Research |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 04 Jan 2021 13:52 |
Last Modified: | 10 Feb 2022 15:14 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | BMJ Publishing Group |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1136/medethics-2020-106815 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:168945 |