A Survey of Ethical Principles and Guidance within Selected Pandemic Plans

The framework also “emphasizes the importance of clarifying the goals of prioritization and proposes the inclusion of ethics experts and the results of modeling exercises to help guide the decision-making process” (PHAC, 2009, 2.0 Other Examples of Vaccine Prioritization Frameworks). [...] 8) Three additional principles, to educate, to reassure, and to be accountable, are listed as the main goals of the Ontario Health and Long Term Care Ministry’s Pandemic Communications Strategy, whose focus is on providing up-to-date and accurate information about the pandemic to both the public and health care workers/stakeholders, informing them of the steps being taken to respond to the pandemi. [...] The issues of the duty of health care professionals to provide care during a pandemic, and of providing legal protections for health care providers who are asked to act outside of their usual realm of responsibilities during a declared public health emergency, were noted to be of central importance but outside the scope of the group’s mandate. [...] The shared ethical values regarded as essential to preserving social cohesion are as follows: • The duty of solidarity at all levels, from the international to the local; • The duty of providing care on the part of health professionals, the duty of society to protect them, their families and those whose work leads them to be exposed (including people collaborating occasionally with the public serv. [...] The maintenance of solidarity between individuals and groups is also conceived of as an ethical imperative in the Swiss plan, and for the same reason: “since it is the task of the state to preserve the life of all its members” (Ibid., p.