Ethical Considerations in Mass Casualty Incidents

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Running head: ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS IN MCI’S Ethical Considerations in Mass Casual Incidents Life is full of unexpected events, when these events are of a negative effect to the community and severe enough to overwhelm the available resources, these are called mass casualty incidents (MCI). Mass casualty events often strike with little or no warning. These events are high stressed with an overwhelming demand of man power and resources. These kinds of incidents require multifaceted responses involving many different types of relief ranging from transportation and food supplies to medical services and domicile allocations. Each event is different with its own challenges and intricacies and despite the best intentions there are organizational variations in communication, application requirements, resource allocation and response processing. These variations (inconsistencies), conflicts and poor coordination in delivery of service have ethical considerations. Before we can talk about ethical considerations we must first define what ethics are. We all have our internal rules and regulations that we live our life by (our internal moral measures). Our society also has norms that define what acceptable behaviors are. These norms are rules of conduct recognized in defining right from wrong in the eyes of society and the law. “Ethics refers to well-founded standards of right and wrong that prescribe what humans out to do, usually in terms of rights, obligations, benefits to society, fairness or specific virtues” (scu.edu, 2010). In mass casualty incidents there are a number of ethical considerations that impose reasonable obligations. These considerations must be well thought-out in the pre-planning process because fair and equal treatments must be provided to all, allocation of resources must be transparent and respect for human life and community norms must
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