Telehealth for the Unvaccinated
From Medpage Today
Excerpt:
Welcome to Ethics Consult — an opportunity to discuss, debate (respectfully), and learn together. We select an ethical dilemma from a true, but anonymized, patient care case, and then we provide an expert’s commentary.
Last week, you voted on if it was ethical to force unvaccinated patients to use telehealth only.
Yes: 69%
No: 31%
And now, bioethicist Jacob M. Appel, MD, JD, weighs in.
COVID-19 has raised many ethical challenges for healthcare providers, including the level of risk they must take when providing patient care. Early in the pandemic, the ability to mitigate these risks was relatively limited, especially when caring for hospitalized patients. Shortages of personal protective equipment rendered mitigation even more challenging.
As a result, it has been reported that 3,607 frontline healthcare workers died of COVID-19 in the U.S. from March 2020 through April 2021.
Read complete article From Medpage Today