Ethical Challenges Experienced by Healthcare Workers Delivering Clinical Care during Health Emergencies and Disasters: A Rapid Review of Qualitative Studies and Thematic Synthesis

Abstract

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has posed several ethical challenges worldwide. Understanding care providers’ experiences during health emergencies is key to develop comprehensive ethical guidelines for emergency and disaster circumstances. Objectives: To identify and synthetize available empirical data on ethical challenges experienced by health care workers (HCWs) providing direct patient care in health emergencies and disaster scenarios that occurred prior to COVID-19, considering there might be a significant body of evidence yet to be reported on the current pandemic. Methods: A rapid review of qualitative studies and thematic synthesis was conducted. Medline and Embase were searched from inception to December 2020 using “public health emergency” and “ethical challenges” related keywords. Empirical studies examining ethical challenges experienced by frontline HCWs during health emergencies or disasters were included. We considered that ethical challenges were present when participants and/or authors were uncertain regarding how one should behave, or when different values or ethical principles are compromised when making decisions. Outcome: After deduplication 10,160 titles/abstracts and 224 full texts were screened. Twenty-two articles were included, which were conducted in 15 countries and explored eight health emergency or disaster events. Overall, a total of 452 HCWs participants were included. Data were organized into five major themes with subthemes: HCWs’ vulnerability, Duty to care, Quality of care, Management of healthcare system, and Sociocultural factors. Conclusion: HCWs experienced a great variety of clinical ethical challenges in health emergencies and disaster scenarios. Core themes identified provide evidence-base to inform the development of more comprehensive and supportive ethical guidelines and training programmes for future events, that are grounded on actual experiences of those providing care during emergency and disasters.