Bioethics in humanitarian disaster relief operations: a military perspective

Abstract

The ethical dilemmas faced every day by military personnel working within the NHS will potentially be very different to ones that will be faced in the wake of a humanitarian disaster. Allied to this the potentially differing objectives from military personnel when compared with other healthcare workers in these scenarios and a conflict of ethics could arise.Within this paper, the fundamentals of this conflict will be explored and how working within the military framework can affect clinical decisions. This is a paper commissioned as a part of the humanitarian and disaster relief operations special issue of BMJ Military Health.

Non-combatant status of military medicine and contemporary warfare: old issues or new problems?

“…Normally the most severely injured are assigned the highest treatment priority, but the threat of nuclear war led to the introduction of the utilitarian ‘T’ system of classification for mass casualties (MASCAL) versus the routine ‘P’ system. The ethics of triage alongside the ethics of MRoE has emerged as an important topic over the past 20 years due to military medical units being deployed to complex humanitarian crises 20. The COVID-19 crisis and the wars in Syria and Ukraine have re-emphasised civil–military cooperation in the organisation of health services to care for the wounded and sick of a national population.…”