The German Supreme Court ruled that persons with disabilities must be protected by legally binding guidelines in case hospitals are forced to introduce a triage system, as the country is preparing for a new, more contagious wave of coronavirus.
The Constitutional Court announced its decision on Tuesday, ordering lawmakers to establish a legal framework to prevent persons with disabilities from being treated unfairly.
It urges the state to develop a set of standards that doctors must refer to before deciding which patients to receive life-saving treatment if the intensive care unit is overcrowded and resources are exhausted.
The case was brought by 9 people with disabilities and pre-existing diseases, who were worried that the current medical guidelines would not protect them if they were neglected or ignored because of the serious illness of Covid-19.
They called on the state government to develop selection criteria, if a choice must be made, these criteria will be used to determine which patients continue to receive potentially life-saving treatment.
One of the complainants, Nancy Poser, is a 42-year-old judge of the district court in the western city of Trier. She suffers from spinal muscular atrophy, and she expressed relief at the ruling. “Legislators are now obligated to protect us because they clearly recognize that disabled people like me are protected by the Basic Law-in an emergency, this law cannot be simply used, which is very comforting,” she told the news. The magazine Der Spiegel.
In its ruling, the court stated that the parliament disregarded the constitution, which stipulates that “no one shall be ignored because of his disability.”
This issue has been a controversial issue for many years, and the court has been hearing the case for the past 18 months because the issue has been significantly alleviated in the early stages of the pandemic.
So far, Germany has not had to resort to diversion, although people are increasingly aware that this method must be used elsewhere EuropeEspecially Italy, during the pandemic. In recent months, because the intensive care unit in some areas has been overcrowded, patients had to be transferred to other areas in Germany and abroad during an operation involving the Air Force.
The decision has been The Minister of Health Karl Lauterbach wrote on Twitter “The disabled need the protection of the state more than anyone else, especially in the case of diversion.” But he added that Germany now needs “effective protective measures and vaccination” to prevent triage.
In Germany, a new wave of coronavirus outbreaks driven by a new, more contagious variant, Omicron, has led to stricter exposure reduction measures in recent days and drove the need for a third booster injection of the Covid vaccine, and Increased the number of people vaccinated for the first time. Just over 70% of Germans are fully vaccinated, and legislators will debate whether to introduce a vaccine authorization next month to solve the problem of slow vaccination.
As the infection rate is expected to increase exponentially in the next few days, doctors and lawyers have broken the taboo and raised ethical questions about whether people who choose not to be vaccinated will be refused treatment or face increased health if they need a hospital, insurance fee.
Tatjana Hörnle, director of the Max Planck Institute for Crime, Safety and Law in Freiburg, believes that it is time to reconsider the “general view of the patient’s previous behavior”-in this case, not being vaccinated-should not Play a role in treatment decisions. She said that in emergency situations such as a pandemic, it is necessary to consider whether a person is of legal age and mental ability. In this case, if resources are short, not all patients in need of intensive care can receive treatment. .
Hörnle told Spiegel that it is “legitimate and reasonable” to point out to people who may “mainly or completely cause their own emergency” that other patients may receive treatment before them.
The German Institute of Human Rights rejected the idea of using vaccine status as a criterion for deciding whether to treat anyone.
“The status of the vaccine should not be allowed to play any role in who should receive intensive treatment,” said its director, Beate Rudolf. “Not even those who behave carelessly or in ununited ways.”
