160: A Survey of Ethical Views and Experiences During a Pandemic: A Critical Care Perspective

INTRODUCTION: As the COVID19 pandemic persists across the globe, health care professionals and institutions continue to face ethical challenges and often are uncertain about their responses to those challenges While some of these ethical issues have been experienced before, e g , ventilator allocation during H1N1, refusing CPR during Ebola outbreak, similar and other unique ethical issues have developed during the COVID19 pandemic To better understand individual and institutional perspectives, we designed and distributed a survey to capture those working health care and others perceive issues surrounding institutional responses to COVID-19 Given the nature of COVID-19, and our interim analysis, it is likely that many of these issues will arise in the critical care setting METHODS: We sent a survey out weekly to two large bioethics listservs starting in April 2020 Members of the listserv were asked to complete the survey each week and to forward the survey to interdisciplinary colleagues who may not be members of these listservs At this point in our analysis we have completed basic descriptive statistics, including X-tabs and Fischer's exact test RESULTS: Using only 6 months of data for participants who complete the survey for the first time, we received 446 respondents since April 2020 The average age of participants was 47 6 and over 71% of participants identified as female 95% of the respondents work primarily in the US with 62% working in critical care setting at least part-time Overall, when asked about the extent to which it is ethically reasonable to limit CPR (during crisis standards of care) for patients with COVID-19, for the sake of conserving scarce resource, nearly 50% of respondents choose the response, ?Can be reasonable, but generally one should not limit CPR ? Relatedly, 64% of respondents believed it was always reasonable to require providers to don all PPE before initiating CPR on a patient with COVID This is especially relevant in light of the finding that over 78% of participants replied that their institution does not or that they were unsure whether or not their institution has a policy that limits CPR for COVID19 patients when there is insufficient PPE CONCLUSIONS: The survey identified the need for broadly collaborative efforts to resolve ethical issues during COVID-19