Moral Decision-Making in Healthcare and Medical Professions During the COVID-19 Pandemic

With the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak, healthcare and medical professions face challenging situations. The high number of COVID-19 infected patients, scarce resources, and being vulnerable to the infection are among the reasons that may influence clinicians’ moral decision-making. Furthermore, healthcare workers may be carriers of coronavirus, resulting in their social interactions to involve moral decision-making. This study aimed to investigate the effect of working in the frontline on psychological and cognitive factors and how these factors influence moral decision-making in clinicians during the pandemic. Further, we evaluated the impact of these factors on compliance with social distancing. Clinicians who worked in hospitals allocated to coronavirus disease patients participated in our study. We designed an online survey containing eight dilemmas to test moral decision-making in clinicians. Information on clinicians’ behavior and psychological state during the COVID-19 pandemic including the degree of respect to social distancing, sources of stress, and dead cases of COVID-19 they confronted with were collected. First, the relation between these measures and moral decision-making was assessed. Next, we used multiple regression analysis to evaluate the degree to which these factors can predict variances in morality. Based on our results, clinicians’ most important source of stress was the infection of their families. Stress, estimated chance of self-infection, job satisfaction, and age predicted utilitarian behavior among them. Moreover, age, number of death cases of COVID-19 they confronted, perceived risk of infection, and stress were positively correlated to compliance with social distancing. Our results have critical implications in implementing policies for healthcare principals.