Study title

20 transcribed and anonymised interviews with military personnel returning from the military-run Ebola treatment centre , Kerry Town, Sierra Leone between March-July 2015. The sample included three broad groups: doctors (7), nurses and healthcare assistants (6), and others such as personal protective equipment monitors, lab technicians and mortuary attendants (7). Interviews explored the ethical challenges participants felt that they had encounters prior to deployment, during deployment and on return from deployment. There is a major Ebola epidemic affecting parts of West Africa. Ebola is a highly infectious disease that carries a significant risk of death. New therapies and potential vaccines that can be distributed to the affected populations are being developed. Stricken communities have appealed for help. One response from the UK government has been to deploy UK military healthcare personnel to Sierra Leone (operation Gritrock), initially to provide a small facility for affected healthcare workers and to assist with training of local healthcare workers. It is possible that the scope of this involvement will increase, and prudent planning is in place for further deployments. This is the first major, purely humanitarian military deployment since Rwanda (1994). It is known that civilian humanitarian healthcare workers experience complex ethical tensions when deployed as expatriates. Military healthcare workers face both related and different (uniquely military) challenges when deployed in conflict scenarios but it is not known how they will experience the novel ethical challenges and complexities in a purely humanitarian setting, dealing with a highly infectious disease in conditions of near disaster for the affected communities. This project aims to collect interview data on the ethical challenges experienced by the deployed UK military healthcare personnel. It plans to recruit up to 25 nurses, doctors, and allied health professionals. An initial analysis of...