{"doi":"10.1200/op.20.00440","title":"COVID-19–Related Ethics Consultations at a Cancer Center in New York City: A Content Review of Ethics Consultations During the Early Stages of the Pandemic","abstract":"PURPOSE: The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has raised a variety of ethical dilemmas for health care providers. Limited data are available on how a patient's concomitant cancer diagnosis affected ethical concerns raised during the early stages of the pandemic. METHODS: We performed a retrospective review of all COVID-related ethics consultations registered in a prospectively collected ethics database at a tertiary cancer center between March 14, 2020, and April 28, 2020. Primary and secondary ethical issues, as well as important contextual factors, were identified. RESULTS: Twenty-six clinical ethics consultations were performed on 24 patients with cancer (58.3% male; median age, 65.5 years). The most common primary ethical issues were code status (n = 11), obligation to provide nonbeneficial treatment (n = 3), patient autonomy (n = 3), resource allocation (n = 3), and delivery of care wherein the risk to staff might outweigh the potential benefit to the patient (n = 3). An additional nine consultations raised concerns about staff safety in the context of likely nonbeneficial treatment as a secondary issue. Unique contextual issues identified included concerns about public safety for patients requesting discharge against medical advice (n = 3) and difficulties around decision making, especially with regard to code status because of an inability to reach surrogates (n = 3). CONCLUSION: During the early pandemic, the care of patients with cancer and COVID-19 spurred a number of ethics consultations, which were largely focused on code status. Most cases also raised concerns about staff safety in the context of limited benefit to patients, a highly unusual scenario at our institution that may have been triggered by critical supply shortages.","journal":"JCO Oncology Practice","year":2020,"id":73290,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":13,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.8852,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2020-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":385623,"name":"Liz Blackler","orcid":"0000-0003-3008-5941","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":386631,"name":"Yesne Alici","orcid":null,"position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":386632,"name":"Amy E. Scharf","orcid":null,"position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":385624,"name":"Martin Chin","orcid":"0000-0002-9311-7288","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":385625,"name":"Sanjay Chawla","orcid":"0000-0002-6840-7988","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":386633,"name":"Monique James","orcid":null,"position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":385626,"name":"Louis Voigt","orcid":"0000-0003-1291-4611","position":7,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":385622,"name":"Danielle Novetsky Friedman","orcid":"0000-0003-4668-9176","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":12,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T21:45:32.034078Z","pmid":"32853121","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}