Scarce Resource Allocation: Medical Ethics Simulator

Allocation Principle

Resources

ICU beds available 6

Patients in queue 18

Outcome

Beds filled

0 / 0

Avg. treated age

–

Expected life-years saved (QALY-proxy)

0.0

Avg. severity left untreated

0.00

Legend

Mild severity Moderate severity Critical severity

Base pad = treated (bed assigned) Base pad = waitlisted

How it works

Each patient carries a severity s ∈ [0,1] (how critical/urgent, loosely SOFA-score-like) and an age. Two derived quantities drive the frameworks:

baseline survival   Ps = 1 − s
life-years proxy    Ly = max(5, 85 − age)
expected benefit    B  = Ps × Ly   (a simple QALY-style
                                    "expected years of life saved
                                    if treated" estimate)

With N beds and M patients, each allocation principle used in real crisis-standards-of-care debates picks a different top-N:

Utilitarian — rank by expected benefit B descending; treat those most likely to gain the most life-years. Maximizes total years saved, but can deprioritize the sickest.
Sickest-First (prioritarian / "rule of rescue") — rank by severity s descending; treat the most critical patients first regardless of predicted benefit.
Lottery (egalitarian) — a uniform random permutation decides the top N; expresses the view that every patient has equal moral claim and no criterion should discriminate.
First-Come, First-Served — rank by arrival order; rewards who reached the queue first, independent of clinical status.

The readouts let you compare frameworks on the same cohort: total expected life-years saved (utilitarian tends to maximize this) versus the average severity of those left untreated (sickest-first minimizes this, at the cost of total benefit). There is no "correct" answer — this is the actual tension real triage committees and ventilator-allocation policies navigate.

Treated (elevated) Waitlisted (floor)

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