Rapid development of ethics guidelines for COVID-19 crisis-level hospital care

Ethical considerations are vital in decision-making, especially if it involves individuals with medical conditions. Faced with the COVID-19 pandemic, the presence of ethically sound guidelines are needed to protect the rights of every COVID-19 patient. With this, the University of the Philippines Manila Foundation, Inc. launched a project to ensure that our healthcare systems are prepared to respond to the burdens of COVID-19, by providing ethical guidelines among health care facility administrators, clinicians, as well as affected families in decision making, management, allocation of resources, and clinical research during the current COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020, the project developed Ethics Guidelines for COVID-19 Hospital Care that will help practitioners navigate through the ethical issues involved in the provision of critical care to COVID-19 patients. The guidelines cover suggestions on how to proceed with ethical issues on (1) Guiding principles, (2) Admission triage, (3) Communication of care, (4) Therapeutic interventions, (5) ICU care, (6) Care for non-COVID-19 patients, (7) Information management, (8) research, (9) Healthcare Workers rights and obligations, (10) Working committees, and (11) Postmortem care. Moreover, the project came up with a template for advanced directives and informed consent forms for COVID-19 infected patients and PUIs, as well as infographic posters for public use and dissemination to help patients and their families understand the ethical rationale behind the decisions taken by the institution and healthcare team.