Bioethics in humanitarian disaster relief operations: a military perspective.

The ethical dilemmas faced every day by military personnel working within the NHS will potentially be very different to ones that will be faced in the wake of a humanitarian disaster. Allied to this the potentially differing objectives from military personnel when compared with other healthcare workers in these scenarios and a conflict of ethics could arise.Within this paper, the fundamentals of this conflict will be explored and how working within the military framework can affect clinical decisions. This is a paper commissioned as a part of the humanitarian and disaster relief operations special issue of BMJ Military Health.