MORAL BALANCE

One of the factors that leads to high levels of health professional burnout is moral distress. Moral distress can occur when doctors and nurses feel unable to do what they perceive to be the right thing or when faced with ethical uncertainty. It is therefore of no surprise that moral distress occurs frequently in critical care. The continuing capacity of technology and medical advances to improve our ability to maintain life, leads to the question of whether critical care is prolonging life or merely prolonging existence... Our ethical framework remains applicable to patient centred decision making especially when there are external constraints. We have created a series of hypothetical COVID 19 case examples. We hope they prove helpful. Key resources for understanding and using the MORAL Balance ethical framework... We have developed an ethical decision making framework based on Beachamp and Childress's Principles of Medical Ethics, and highly recommend their book which is in its 7th..