Care can be forced to choose older people - to save young people

Health care always needs to be prioritized. But in a situation where the number of coronas infected who need intensive care is increasing dramatically, this can result in many difficult decisions.

Therefore, new guidelines for priorities in health care have been developed on behalf of the National Board of Health and Welfare.

- Suppose we get completely full departments with many very seriously ill people who have marginal conditions to come back to life after intensive care and then knock other more basic people at the door. Then it can be a very difficult decision, says Andreas Hvarfner, chief physician in anesthesia and intensive care at Karolinska University Hospital in Solna.

Will this mean that infected elderly patients who have severe diabetes, carbon, pacemakers and are overweight are at risk of not receiving IVA care?

- Of course, that can ultimately lead to it, says Andreas Hvarfner.

In the News on Friday night, Lars Sandman, professor of health ethics at Linköping University, who participated in the development of the new guidelines.

- When faced with these difficult decisions, it is important that there is clear support and that one can lean back on ethical principles that in this case are legal and instituted by Parliament in 1997. We have tried to clarify how they should be interpreted , he says in Aktuellt.

If there is now a storm that many believe, will people prioritize between people who may have roughly the same conditions?

- It can be so in an extreme situation. Then we have stated in the guidelines that we choose the one with the longest expected remaining life. We want to avoid getting into that situation and therefore care is working hard to get more intensive care places.

This means that young people are ahead of the elderly if they have similar conditions to survive. According to Lars Sandman, the problem is that there are no alternatives.

- Of course, you can imagine a queuing situation, but then you run the risk that a patient who may have less chance of survival gets the place and that two patients instead of one die in the end.