Helen MacDonald

He's a medical and humanitarian ethicist working for the British Medical Association as well as for Médecins Sans Frontières and other NGOs.

And I asked him about ethics, guidance and COVID-19

and asked him to share some of his ethical insights.

And do you see the ethical issues being dealt with

well on the whole?

I think that's right, because it's hard to understand, isn't it?

I think as a member of the public, why in

one area you might be suitable for admission or escalation and then somewhere else you wouldn't be.

That might feel quite unfair to people.

So if we took the idea of triaging or rationing services, what are the key issues that guideline makers, national or local, should be thinking about?

I think a lot of clinicians will worry about...

the legal implications of rationing decisions, which is why I think a lot of them would welcome national level guidance to assist and support them in that thinking, to be clear that they're using accepted and well thought through best practice.

To what extent do legal implications or ethical implications differ in a crisis situation or a situation that's sort of so

Julian, you've also done some work in lower resource settings.

Yes.

Tell us about the specific challenges that COVID is bringing up there.

I think Julian's reflections on PPE and lower resource settings are very striking.

I guess there were two other points that cropped up for me.

One of the bigger points that Julian made was around how complicated decision-making in COVID is and how

It involves science.