Eröffnungsplenum (Begrüßung und Keynote Prof. Orfali)


Begrüßung

  1. Prof. Dr. Annika Herr (Universität Hannover)
  2. Frau Katharina Brederlow (Beigeordnete für Bildung und Soziales der Stadt Halle)
  3. Prof. Dr. Insa Theesfeld (Prorektorin der Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg)
  4. Prof. Dr. Henning Rosenau (Geschäftsführender Direktor des Interdisziplinären Zentrums Medizin-Ethik-Recht der Universität Halle)

Moderation
Prof. Dr. Amelie Wuppermann (Tagungspräsidentin)



Keynote I

"Pandemic ethics & tragic choices: the past and the future"

Kristina Orfali, Columbia Medical Center and NY Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital Clinical Ethics Committee

Kristina Orfali

The COVID-19 pandemic has raised a host of ethical challenges, but key among these has been the possibility that health care systems might need to ration scarce critical care resources – a situation that actually occurred in many cases. First, Dr. Orfali will briefly present an overview of the different approaches and ethical frameworks regarding the allocation of scarce resources in Europe versus the US, particularly during the early phase of the pandemic when uncertainty prevailed at all levels. Second, and given the very limited number of available empirical studies on what really happened, she will present, through observational data, media reporting, reviews and interviews, some of the untold dramatic story of triage during the early context of the pandemic both in the US and in some European countries with different healthcare systems. Finally, she will draw from these cross-cultural experiences some lessons for future pandemics. She will argue that a key issue is how to build trust and accountability in order to increase public support in situations of scarcity and uncertainty.

Kristina Orfali is a Professor of Bioethics in Pediatrics at Columbia Medical Center, as well as a clinical ethicist and a member of the NY Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital Clinical Ethics Committee. Trained in France at the Ecole Normale Superieure and the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris, she holds a Ph.D. in Social Sciences from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Before joining CUMC she has been an Assistant Professor in Medicine and Associate Director at the MacLean Center for Clinical Ethics at the University of Chicago and a Research Scholar at the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy (ISERP) at Columbia. Her research and publications span a variety of ethical issues. She has published work in a cross-cultural perspective on patient's hospital experiences, on clinician and family decision-making and on neonatal ethics. Her more recent work focuses on ethical dilemmas, subjective risk assessment and international variations in neonatal prognosis with a particular emphasis on the links between decision theory and empirical results. Finally, she has published several comparative papers (USA-Europe) on the ethical issues raised by patient ‘triage’ during the Covid-19 pandemic.