Scenario: Ethics and Resource Allocation

If you are the clinical vice-president of a large urban teaching hospital, with a regional population of 650,000 people. The CDC has issued a coronavirus pandemic alert, indicating mass exposure and a national emergency in response to the coronavirusdisease-2019 (COVID-19). Person-to-person spread happens through inhalation and exposure to droplets via hand to face contact. The virus is highly contagious, is thought to have a 14-day period of incubation. It also has the highest mortality rate per person infected since the Spanish Flu of 1918.

Your data indicates close to 150,000 people in your region are infected, 130,000 between the age of 15 to 50, and 20,000 people 51 years of age and over.Your hospital's ICUshave the capacity to handle 200 patients and has 50 ventilators. Your epidemiologist and experts collaborating with her anticipate a need for 400 ICU beds and 100 ventilators.As the clinical vice president, you have been assigned the duty to determine how the hospital will expand ICU capacity and to discuss the anticipated need for another 75 ventilators.

How would I put this together: Speaking points to present my leadership analysis for a group discussion in which I will be the lead: Where do I start and how do I end? Lost!!

1. Provide a brief but thorough analysis to my hospital's board of directors, then to staff and program clinical managers. Based on "Life Cycle" versus the "Save the Most Lives" principles of resource allocation- using them in my speaking points to my group.

2. How would I address the ICU capacity (i.e. Who will receive/ have access to ventilators)?

3.What aresome of the social justice and bioethics issues that come with the decisions/answers I should use in my speaking points?