The coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic has affected nearly every aspect of medicine and raises numerous moral dilemmas for clinicians. Foremost of these quandaries is how to delineate and implement crisis standards of care and, specifically, how to consider how health care resources should be distributed in times of shortage. We review basic principles of disaster planning and resource stewardship with ethical relevance for this and future public health crises, explore the role of illness severity scoring systems and their limitations and potential contribution to health disparities, and consider the role for exceptionally resource-intensive interventions. We also review the philosophical and practical underpinnings of crisis standards of care and describe historical approaches to scarce resource allocation to offer analysis and guidance for pediatric clinicians. Particular attention is given to the impact on children of this endeavor. Although few children have required hospitalization for symptomatic infection, children nonetheless have the potential to be profoundly affected by the strain on the health care system imposed by the pandemic and should be considered prospectively in resource allocation frameworks.

Many cancers presenting in children and adolescents are curable with surgery, chemotherapy, and/or radiotherapy. Potential adverse consequences of treatment include sterility, infertility, or subfertility as a result of gonad removal, damage to germ cells as a result of adjuvant therapy, or damage to the pituitary and hypothalamus or uterus as a result of irradiation. In recent years, treatment of solid tumors and hematologic malignancies has been modified in an attempt to reduce damage to the gonadal axis. Simultaneously, advances in assisted reproductive technology have led to new possibilities for the prevention and treatment of infertility. This clinical report reviews the medical aspects and ethical considerations that arise when considering fertility preservation in pediatric and adolescent patients with cancer.

Objective: Owing to resident work-hour reductions and more permanent personnel in the newborn intensive care unit (NICU), we sought to determine if pediatric housestaff are missing learning opportunities in procedural training due to non-participation.Study Design: A prospective, observational study was conducted at an academic NICU using self-reported data from neonatal personnel after attempting 188 procedures on 109 neonates, and analyzed using Fisher's exact and w 2 -tests.Result: Housestaff first attempted 32% of procedures (P<0.001) and were less likely to make attempts early in the academic year (P<0.001).There was no significant difference in attempts based on urgency of situation (P ¼ 0.742). Of procedures performed by non-housestaff personnel, 93% were completed while housestaff were present elsewhere in the unit. Conclusion:Pediatric housestaff performed the minority of procedures in the NICU, even in non-urgent situations, and were often uninvolved in other procedures, representing missed learning opportunities.

Informed consent should be seen as an essential part of health care practice; parental permission and childhood assent is an active process that engages patients, both adults and children, in health care. Pediatric practice is unique in that developmental maturation allows, over time, for increasing inclusion of the child's and adolescent's opinion in medical decision-making in clinical practice and research.

Congenital bilateral renal agenesis has been considered a uniformly fatal condition. However, the report of using serial amnioinfusions followed by the live birth in 2012 and ongoing survival of a child with bilateral renal agenesis has generated hope, but also considerable controversy over an array of complex clinical and ethical concerns. To assess the ethical concerns associated with using serial amnioinfusions for bilateral renal agenesis, we assembled a multidisciplinary group to map the ethical issues relevant to this novel intervention. The key ethical issues identified were related to 1) potential risks and benefits, 2) clinical care compared with innovation compared with research, 3) counseling of expectant parents, 4) consent, 5) outcome measures, 6) access and justice, 7) conflicts of interest, 8) effects on clinicians, 9) effects on institutions, and 10) long-term societal implications. These ethical issues should be addressed in conjunction with systematic efforts to examine whether this intervention is safe and effective. Future work should capture the experiences of expectant parents, women who undergo serial amnioinfusions, those born with bilateral renal agenesis and their families as well as clinicians confronted with making difficult choices related to it.