Question

How would you decide who gets ventilators during a pandemic flu?

* Please help to list 5-10 criteria that you think would be most important when deciding how to ration ventilators in order from most important to least, and explain the reasons behind each of your criteria.

Answer 1

A pandemic flu means the outbreak of the deadly infection in a wide spread area and the high patient number in the healthcare sector.This type of situation can make a ethical and legal problem of who should given care on priority list.The decision on ventilator is done on the ground of who can survive and who cannot survive.

Some of the criteria which are needed to make this decision are

• The patient who has high chance of getting reversed from the infection and can survive
• The patient who has hypotension with four or more organ involved in failure
• Checking the presence of any comorbid conditions in case of lung disease,cancer,etc., where the ventilation can hardly help .This us because of this associated condition which can give a poor prognosis
• Patient who has respiratory failure gets a least priority compared to others
• Age of the patient, young patient can be opted whose survival rate is high integers to the treatment
• Availability of the trained and skilled staff to operate the ventilator