Who Gets the Last Bed? A Discrete-Choice Experiment Examining General Population Preferences for Intensive Care Bed Prioritization in a Pandemic

OBJECTIVE: To explore the key patient attributes important to members of the Australian general population when prioritizing patients for the final intensive care unit (ICU) bed in a pandemic over-capacity scenario. METHODS: A discrete-choice experiment administered online asked respondents (N = 306) to imagine the COVID-19 caseload had surged and that they were lay members of a panel tasked to allocate the final ICU bed. They had to decide which patient was more deserving for each of 14 patient pairs. Patients were characterized by 5 attributes: age, occupation, caregiver status, health prior to being infected, and prognosis. Respondents were randomly allocated to one of 7 sets of 14 pairs. Multinomial, mixed logit, and latent class models were used to model the observed choice behavior. RESULTS: A latent class model with 3 classes was found to be the most informative. Two classes valued active decision making and were slightly more likely to choose patients with caregiving responsibilities over those without. One of these classes valued prognosis most strongly, with a decreasing probability of bed allocation for those 65 y and older. The other valued both prognosis and age highly, with decreasing probability of bed allocation for those 45 y and older and a slight preference in favor of frontline health care workers. The third class preferred more random decision-making strategies. CONCLUSIONS: For two-thirds of those sampled, prognosis, age, and caregiving responsibilities were the important features when making allocation decisions, although the emphasis varies. The remainder appeared to choose randomly.