Doctors and health-care professionals at Winnipeg's St. Boniface General Hospital spent Tuesday sorting through some weighty ethical issues they will face if an influenza pandemic hits the city.

From whether health workers should be forced to work during a pandemic to which patients doctors should treat first, staff debated a number of questions with national experts on pandemic preparedness and health-care ethics in a forum Tuesday.

Timothy Caulfield, a professor with the Health Law Institute at the University of Alberta, said health-care staff and their professional associations must set clear guidelines on workers' duty to care before any pandemic strikes.

"Part of our goal is relatively modest but still important, and that is to just create the expectation," he said.

"You know you're going into this profession, this is the expectation, if a pandemic emerges, for your performance."

Caulfield said health-care workers must also figure out how they'll use their resources in a pandemic — and who should receive care right away, or any care at all.

"Some of the decisions that you might make are going to be really tough," he said. "For example, should you give a priority to health-care workers, keep them working?

"Do you give priority to the young or the old? … Do you give higher priority to those individuals that are going to respond to treatment, or do you give higher priority to those that are tremendously ill?"

The forum runs all day Tuesday.