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Planning for ventilator use in an epidemic

Case Management Weekly, March 25, 2008

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A report by New York state health officials says that physicians, healthcare workers, and the public need to start thinking about which patients would be given a ventilator in the event of an epidemic, according to The New York Times.

The report is entitled, "Allocation of Ventilators in a Public Health Disaster," and appears in the March issue of Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness, which is a quarterly journal of the American Medical Association.

The authors of the report say that their guidelines are a first of their kind in the nation and may be used as a template for rationing in other catastrophes. The report says that, in a disaster, triage of ventilators should depend on the prognosis for recovery instead of other factors such as underlying health or age.

The guidelines from the report recommend the appointment of "triage officers" to make ventilator decisions based on the number of incoming patients and their conditions. This is to avoid giving the healthcare team caring for the patients the added responsibility of these decisions, which, according to the report, could be overly stressful.

Source: The New York Times

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