Abstract
Modern medicine consumes vast amounts of resources, ranging from human to technological and financial. In a well-functioning and well-equipped health system, resource allocation considerations rarely impact clinical decision-making as all patients that need care will (eventually) receive it. In light of this, health care providers (HCPs) are often taught to focus on the patient in front of them, driven by a type of patient-centred ethics (of care) that prioritizes the individual person’s well-being above the aggregate. Informed by the principle of autonomy and respect for individual self-determination, patients in well-resourced health systems often have the autonomy to make decisions that require high resource utilization with little concern directed to how these choices may impact the care provided to other patients or groups of patients. In fact, it is generally accepted that if resources are sufficient, patients and their providers should be able to make medical decisions unencumbered by considerations related to broader resource allocation (with some caveats related to personal or national health insurance schemes). This means that the average HCP in the best case and in their daily routine spends little time considering how their clinical choices might impact the care available to others—concerns related to how resources are allocated, and who receives care are far removed from clinical interaction and related medical decision-making.
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Acknowledgments
Our sincere thanks go to the contributors of this volume who conscientiously prepared their chapters and revised them during the editing process. It is obvious that without their efforts, this book could not have been edited.
Financial support for the work on this volume was granted by the Centre of Competence for Military and Disaster Medicine of the Swiss Armed Forces.
We would also like to thank the anonymous referees for their constructive comments on an earlier version of the manuscript, as well as the team at Springer for their support throughout the conception and production of this volume.
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Eagan, S.M., Messelken, D. (2023). Introduction and Synopsis. In: Eagan, S.M., Messelken, D. (eds) Resource Scarcity in Austere Environments. Military and Humanitarian Health Ethics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29059-6_1
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