ArticleThe Hastings Center report2021
Ventilator Allocation Protocols: Sophisticated Bioethics for an Unworkable Strategy.
Article in The Hastings Center report, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed.
- Simulating crisis triage: a methodological framework for evaluating ventilator allocation under crisis standards of care.BMC medical research methodology · 2026Article
- Rationing, Responsibility, and Vaccination during COVID-19: A Conceptual Map.The American journal of bioethics : AJOB · 2024Article
- Review
- Investigating Ethical Tradeoffs in Crisis Standards of Care through Simulation of Ventilator Allocation Protocols.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2024Article
- Investigating ethical tradeoffs in crisis standards of care through simulation of ventilator allocation protocols.PloS one · 2024Article
- Experiences of US Clinicians Contending With Health Care Resource Scarcity During the COVID-19 Pandemic, December 2020 to December 2021.JAMA network open · 2023Article
- Who gets the ventilator? A multicentre survey of intensivists' opinions of triage during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.Acta anaesthesiologica Scandinavica · 2022Article
- Ethics of Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation under Conventional and Crisis Standards of Care.The Journal of clinical ethics · 2022Article
- Ventilator Allocation Protocols: Sophisticated Bioethics for an Unworkable Strategy.The Hastings Center report · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
I was a member of the Massachusetts advisory working group that wrote the Commonwealth's crisis standards of care guidance for the Covid-19 pandemic, and I was proud of the work we did, thinking carefully about whether age should matter and whether priority should be given to essential workers if there was a scarcity of medical resources, about whether protocols should address issues of structural racism, and so forth. But as a critical care physician, I have concluded that, no matter how sophisticated the ethical analysis, the fundamental approach we proposed was flawed and virtually impossible to implement. All the existing allocation protocols that states developed are based on the assumption that clinicians will be faced with the task of selecting which patients will be offered a ventilator from among a population of patients who are each in need of one. The protocols then assign patients a priority category, and the protocols specify "tie-breaking" criteria to be used when necessary. The problem with this approach for ventilator allocation is that it has no relationship whatsoever to what happens in the real world.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.