[Sent – 14 April 2020 to the 170+ surgeons et al of our Surgical Ethics (Education) Consortium]
Good
morning. For ‘Surgical Ethics Education Resources #31’, I am sharing
with you an attempt during the COVID-19 pandemic to raise awareness of
and to press for insight into the disproportionate risk, suffering, and
death faced by vulnerable ethnic populations among our patients. Here
in St. Louis, patients residing in predominantly African American
sections of the city are tracking toward the worst scenario public
health models while the city overall is tracking toward the best
scenario public health models as the peak for a COVID-19 surge reaches
St. Louis. Not surprisingly, the overall impression absorbs (conceals?)
the experience of vulnerable sub-sets of the city’s population. One of
our BJC network of hospitals is located in the hardest hit section of
the city. For the past decade, I have led the hospital’s ethics consult
team and am now assisting the hospital’s recently constituted COVID-19
triage team. Last week I sent to these front-line medical staff and
nursing staff leaders (as well as to the hospital’s full ethics
committee) links to four recent newspaper articles in the St. Louis American. For more than a century, the St. Louis American
has reported local, state, and national news through an African
American lens. Issues are published weekly, available throughout the
city, and free. I have inserted below the links to these four St. Louis American
articles as examples of a way to alert, to remind, and to encourage
caregivers to be mindful of those easily overlooked and poorly
understood as they make/implement excruciating decisions about
(re)distributing severely limited resources. I hope you have a few
minutes to take a look. What patient groups in your communities are
experiencing disproportionate risk, suffering, and death during the
COVID-19 pandemic? I suspect your communities have resources such as
the St. Louis American that draw attention to these patient groups
(essentially call for ‘respect’, meaning to be seen). How can you use
these resources to advocate for those patients too/so easily missed on
the margins/periphery of who is included in ‘the public’, ‘the
community’, in ‘we/us’? Doug
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http://www.stlamerican.com/news/local_news/black-st-louis-left-behind-in-covid-19-testing-supplies/article_c70a05f4-7451-11ea-8571-832f999891aa.html
http://www.stlamerican.com/news/columnists/guest_columnists/why-north-st-louis-city-needs-a-covid-19-testing-site-now/article_59851be4-7029-11ea-8a47-33453dfbc765.html
http://www.stlamerican.com/news/local_news/covid-19-and-structural-racism/article_65fb3012-79c4-11ea-8cf9-e336755de3ea.html
http://www.stlamerican.com/news/columnists/guest_columnists/now-is-the-time-to-prioritize-older-adults-before-it-s-too-late/article_23c02c8a-72b1-11ea-bb49-8b8e17551334.html
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