VIU is launching a new Summer School and a webinar series (within the Global Challenges Initiatives) to address one of the most discussed and debated criteria for access to intensive care during the Covid-19 pandemic.
In Italy, during the most dramatic juncture of the pandemic (March-April 2020), in the most affected areas (Bergamo, Brescia, Lodi, Cremona), in some interviews given by doctors on the front line to some newspapers, we heard about "patient selection" and “chronological age criterion”.
Across the world, health care professionals have been grappling with the unprecedented challenges of the global Covid-19 pandemic. Ethics committees of various countries have produced numerous documents in which selection criteria have been proposed. Similarly, scientific societies have proposed guidelines for doctors. Some of these criteria have raised wide debates in public opinion. One of the most discussed is the age criterion.
On the one hand, there are those who consider the age criterion as an ethical, objective, and cost-effective criterion, capable of achieving the greatest good for the greatest number. On the other hand, however, we have those who contest it, considering it an example of ageism, or discrimination against older people.
Through the Summer School and Webinar series VIU will address this debate at an international level and from an interdisciplinary perspective, involving different actors, from public institutions, academia, and scientific societies.
The program offers students and early career researchers the opportunity to critically reflect, with the help of highly qualified experts, on topical issues that raise ethical and deontological dilemmas, relating to ageing and end of life. A fundamental feature of the School concerns its method, which is characterized by a continuous and intense interdisciplinary exchange between doctors, philosophers, economists, jurists, psychiatrists, and sociologists. During this first edition, the course will focus on the problem of patient triage during the Covid-19 pandemic.
In this Global Challenges Webinar Series we will explore the debate on these topical and urgent issues, with the help of qualified speakers, who have been protagonists of the intellectual debate. We will discuss how culture processes epidemic events, how infectious calamities are perceived by society, and how societies react to epidemics.
Extreme situations often force rationing medical resources, so that ethics and law are called upon to reflect on issues of justice
