Vol. 44 No. 2 (2024)
Critical Notes

COVID-19, Scarce Health Resources Allocation and Standard View of Disability: On the Colombian Constitutional Court's Judgement T-237 of 2023

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  • Lautaro Leani
Lautaro Leani
Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales de América Latina, Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales, Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas, Buenos Aires, Argentina / Universidad de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36446/af.e1044

Published 2024-11-08

Keywords

  • Equidad en salud,
  • Discapacidad,
  • Triaje,
  • Calidad de vida,
  • Asignación de recursos,
  • Preparación ante emergencias
    • ...More
    Less
  • Health Equity,
  • Resources Allocation,
  • Disability,
  • Triage,
  • Ethical Preparedness,
  • Quality of Life
    • ...More
    Less
Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Abstract

Judgement T-237/23 of the Constitutional Court of Colombia responds to a tutela petition filed by a group of twenty-six people over the age of 60, disabled and/or chronically ill against the Colombian Ministry of Health and Social Protection. It identifies the lack of binding recommendations on triage by the Ministry, which enabled, among other things, the development and use of a series of triage criteria that are suspect in relation to the rights of certain populations. This critical note aims to link the questioned triage criteria to the so-called “standard view of disability” in order to show the ethical and epistemic problems of establishing prioritisation or tie-breaker criteria for the scarce health resources allocation based on scores related to a person’s quality of life or “functional independence”. To do so, I will focus on the ethical recommendations elaborated by the Grupo Intensivistas Antioquia and the Mayor’s Office of Medellín that have been challenged in the tutela petition and in the third section of judgement T-237/23.

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