A Call to Duty; but Duty to Who? -: Voices of Healthcare Providers in Conflict Zones.

Abstract

Serving as a healthcare worker in a conflict zone is an experience that is characterized by peculiar and unimaginable challenges. This commentary is an exposition on twelve collated stories of healthcare providers currently serving or who have previously served in war. The stories bring to bear the heaviness of emotions such as fear and guilt that the authors grappled with, while concurrently showing that they embody virtues such as altruism, self-sacrifice, courage, and solidarity. In these stories, we see highlighted recurrent ethical themes including the tension between the duty to others and the duty to self, prioritization and allocation of scarce health resources, ethics of research in war, ethics of virtue and the lasting effects of war. This commentary thus explores and heightens our awareness of the interplay between personal morals and the translation of these into ethics of healthcare provision in war. In so doing, the commentary urges us to reflect on ways by which we can engage the discourse pertaining to war and healthcare ethics.