>Dr. Christine Grady
As more COVID-19 vaccines become available for healthcare workers, nurses may want to seek guidance in deciding whether to receive the vaccine. Gathering information from reliable resources and considering the ethical elements involved can help ensure that your decision reflects your knowledge and values.
AACN President Elizabeth Bridges spoke with Christine Grady, a nurse bioethicist and a senior investigator who currently serves as chief of the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center, about the ethical considerations involved in making decisions about COVID-19 vaccination, including the hospital's obligations and relevant provisions from the Nursing Code of Ethics. View the video and the transcript below. You can also review “AACN Statement on COVID-19 Vaccination”.
Christine Grady: Healthcare organizations of course have to figure out the who, what, when, where, and how of vaccinating employees and patients eventually. I think ethically the complicated place that we're beginning is because there is insufficient amount of vaccine for everyone who might appropriately be vaccinated. As many of you know, there've been a number of groups who have spent some time over the last several months – including the National Academy of Science and Engineering and Medicine, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices that advises the CDC, the Strategic Advisory Committee of Experts for the WHO, and a number of academics – to sort out a framework for ethically allocating vaccine, appreciating or anticipating that at the beginning, we won't have enough.
Christine Grady: They all sort of agree on the main values, which is kind of interesting, the main values and goals of ethical allocation. That the primary value should be maximizing benefit. Reducing disease, reducing serious disease, but that that's not the only principle or value. The other ones are making sure that we pay attention to how to keep society running in ways that preserve function. Another one is paying attention to equity, and the kinds of disadvantages that are showing up, and how we can address or mitigate them in terms of allocating vaccines. All of these are really important and very useful values that guide the determinations that healthcare organizations are going to have to make, or are making. It's interesting too, though, that it doesn't stop there.
Christine Grady: Once you say “maximizing benefit,” who comes to the top of the list are healthcare providers. And especially health care providers who have contact, direct contact with patients who are in high risk occupations in terms of their contact with patients, maybe exposure prone procedures, and activities. Critical care nurses are way at the top of that list. Healthcare organizations have to make further granular decisions about, okay, among the healthcare workers that work in our institutions or institution, how do we prioritize them? Who gets the top priority? How do we roll this out in a fair way, over time as more vaccine becomes available? How do we protect the staff that we have, and give them the option of volunteering to be vaccinated?
full interview
https://www.aacn.org/newsroom/covid-19-vaccination-ethical-considerations?sc_camp=63037852B2D54339B90A09A8F1F38011