In response to the COVID-19 outbreak, ADI has sought to highlight some important issues affecting people living with dementia. In response, ADI has published two papers around the difficult decisions people with dementia, their families and carers are having to make about hospital admission and triage during COVID-19.
This second paper, intended to compliment ‘COVID-19 and dementia: Difficult decisions about hospital admission and triage’, by provides an ethical backdrop around health resource allocation, quality of life and transparency in decision-making.
In the piece, Dr Linda Barclay and Glenn Rees write:
The extraordinary circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic bring into sharp focus a fact of life that most of us ignore: that health care resources are always limited. This is very true for people with dementia and more generally for people with disabilities. They are limited by political and economic decisions concerning expenditure on medical research, drug subsidies, health care funding and so on.
