Ethics Education in COVID-19: Preclinical Medical Students’ Approach to Ventilator Allocation

Introduction COVID-19 has confronted clinicians with a potential need to ration ventilators. There is little guidance for training medical students to make such decisions in future practice. How students would make ventilator triage decisions remains unknown. Methods One hundred fifty-three medical students in 18 problem-based learning groups participated in a ventilator-rationing exercise in April 2020 as part of an ethics curriculum adapted in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Students were provided with a prompt requiring fictional patients to be prioritized for ventilators in the face of scarce resources. The authors reviewed group responses, tallied triage criteria, and identified approaches to triage decisions. Results The most common triage criteria were patient comorbidities, clinical status, age/life stage, prognosis, life expectancy, and an individual’s role in pandemic response. Additional criteria included quality of life, ventilator availability, public perception, and patient need. Students approached triage decisions by developing systems for triage, appealing to empirical evidence and academic literature, making value judgments, and identifying adjuncts and alternatives to triage. Discussion With minimal input from educators, students learned key ethical principles in triage medicine, recapitulated approaches to triage described in the clinical and bioethics literature, and suggested methods for tolerating distress of complex ethical decisions. Medical education should equip students to critically consider bioethical concerns in triage and prepare for possible moral distress during public health crises.