Australian Health Management Plan for Pandemic Influenza

B4. Ethical framework

In the event of an influenza pandemic, a number of difficult decisions will need to be made about a wide range of pandemic response and recovery issues. These decisions may include questions about restricting individual’s freedom and allocating limited resources.

These decisions will affect all people, whether they are members of the public, leaders of government, health workers, or other people involved in the essential functioning of society.

There could be conflicts between the needs of the population and those of the individual. Ethical issues may also arise about privacy, confidentiality, provision of health care and safety of employees.

The AHPC has agreed on an ethical framework to guide the health sector response. The following ethical values are taken into account when planning and implementing actions:

• Protection of the public—ensuring that the protection of the entire population remains a primary focus.
• Stewardship—that leaders strive to make good decisions based on best available evidence.
• Trust—that health decision makers strive to communicate in a timely and transparent manner to the public and those within the health system.
• Equity—providing care in an equitable manner, recognising the special needs, cultural values and religious beliefs of different members of our community—this is especially important when providing health services to vulnerable individuals, such as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and people who are culturally and linguistically diverse.
• Proportionality—ensuring that measures taken are proportional to the threat.
• Reciprocity—ensuring that when individuals are asked to take measures or perform duties for the benefit of society as a whole, their acts are appropriately recognised and legitimate need associated with these acts are met where possible.
• Provision of care—ensuring that health care workers are able to deliver care appropriate to the situation, commensurate with good practice and their profession’s code of ethics.
• Individual liberty—ensuring that the rights of the individual are upheld as much as possible.
• Privacy and confidentiality of individuals is important and should be protected, however, under extraordinary conditions during a pandemic it may be necessary for some elements to be overridden to protect others.

Rapid medical or scientific research may be required in a pandemic. Leading Australian guidance on ethical values and principles with respect to human research can be found in the National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research (National Health and Medical Research Council (2007)).

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This information is current for 03 September, 2010
This information was issued on 05 December, 2008