Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has raised many ethical concerns for healthcare practitioners. One concern is how much risk the public and other stakeholders expect that nurses, physicians, and other frontline healthcare providers should accept in their day-to-day work life. This chapter discusses risks that nurses and physicians accept when they enter the profession. It examines how the concept of “acceptable risk” has been defined in other contexts, such as by engineers and in human subjects’ research, to help inform a definition for the healthcare field, where a definition of acceptable risk is lacking. When the COVID-19 pandemic introduced deadly risks into the working lives of nurses, many accepted them, and this chapter addresses factors in their decisions to do so and how we can begin to plan for the next pandemic and create safer workplaces for healthcare providers. The nursing profession should accept the challenge of formally defining acceptable risk for its constituents and whether there are some risks that are more acceptable than others, especially during a pandemic.
The dangers of life are infinite, and among them is safety.—Goethe.
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Ulrich, C.M. (2022). What Are Acceptable Risks during a Pandemic?. In: Ulrich, C.M., Grady, C. (eds) Nurses and COVID-19: Ethical Considerations in Pandemic Care. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82113-5_2
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