Background Rationing and allocation decisions at the clinical level – bedside rationing – entail complex dilemmas that clinicians and managers often find difficult to handle. There is a lack of mechanisms and aids for promoting fair decisions, especially in hard cases. Reports indicate that clinical ethics committees sometimes handle cases that involve bedside rationing dilemmas. Can CECs have a legitimate role to play in bedside rationing? Main text Aided by two frameworks for legitimate priority setting, we discuss how CECs can (...) contribute to enhanced epistemic, procedural and political legitimacy in bedside rationing decisions. Drawing on previous work we present brief case vignettes and outline several potential roles that CECs may play, and then discuss whether these might contribute to rationing decisions becoming legitimate. In the process, key prerequisites for such legitimacy are identified. Legitimacy places demands on aspects such as the CEC’s deliberation process, the involvement of stakeholders, transparency of process, the opportunity to appeal decisions, and the competence of CEC members. On these conditions, CECs can help strengthen the legitimacy of some of the rationing decisions clinicians and managers have to make. Conclusions On specified conditions, CECs can have a well-justified advisory role to play in order to enhance the legitimacy of bedside rationing decisions. (shrink)

Should we let personal responsibility for health-related behavior influence the allocation of healthcare resources? In this paper, we clarify what it means to be responsible for an action. We rely on a crucial conceptual distinction between being responsible and holding someone responsible, and show that even though we might be considered responsible and blameworthy for our health-related actions, there could still be well-justified reasons for not considering it reasonable to hold us responsible by giving us lower priority. We transform these (...) philosophical considerations into analytical use first by assessing the general features of health-related actions and the corresponding healthcare needs. Then, we identify clusters of structural features that even adversely affected people cannot reasonably deny constitute actions for which they should be held responsible. We summarize the results in an analytical framework that can be used by decision-makers when considering personal responsibility for health as a criterion for setting priorities. (shrink)