UNDERSTANDING OUTCOMES OF THE PANDEMIC: SAFETY ETHICS

Abstract

Summing up the interim results in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic determines a multidisciplinary approach to studying the problem of security for all spheres of society. The analysis of the priority of scientific publications carried out on the platform of the information resource CyberLeninka showed that the main interest of researchers is medical and information security. Taking into account the tendency for legal norms to lag behind ethical ones, and the specifics of the legal support of these spheres of social life, a working hypothesis was developed based on the assumption that the explication of ethical challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic will determine the strategy of social policy in these priority areas. Quantitative and qualitative sociological methods (content analysis, case study, survey) were used in the work. Fragments of sociological research carried out in collaboration based on the Volgograd and Gomel State Medical Universities are used. The results obtained demonstrate ethical deformations in the medical and, in general, in the social sphere. In the context of the pandemic, the problem of the vulnerability of socially unprotected groups has become more acute. The basic moral tenets of the ethics of care are violated in relation to patients with severe concomitant diseases and patients with limited mobility. The extreme conditions which the national health care system found itself began to be perceived in the professional group of medical specialists as "extenuating circumstances" allowing, in conditions of survival, to neglect not only medical ethics, but also the law. These tendencies are reflected in the minds of future doctors, which requires strengthening the positions of the humanitarian block of disciplines in the curricula of professional education. The tendencies noted have an international nature, which determines the possible implementation of the approaches developed in the process of international collaboration into the practice of humanitarian national professional education.