Read a wide range of articles written by authorities on the subject of ethics and physical therapy. Below are short synopses for each article with links you can click on to read the full article.
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People break rules for four reasons - human error, stuff happens, negligence and recklessness. The worst offender is somebody who intentionally violates a rule or social/ethical standards within the licensing act. Ethics remediation is a complex subject and developing an effective and fair program to deal with ethics violations may seem – and probably is - difficult. All sorts of issues arise.
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Just culture is the process, the concept, of attempting to manage human fallibility through system design and behavioral choices that we have within our organization.
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Jessica Santillan was a 17-year old girl from Mexico whose family reportedly paid a smuggler to bring her to the United States for a life-saving heart and lung transplant. The young woman died after organs with the wrong blood type were implanted by doctors at Duke University Medical Center. I kept wondering how something like that could happen at a prestigious hospital with some of the most highly skilled physicians in the country. It was also a hospital that trains doctors.
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A license to engage in the practice of a regulated profession is a privilege available only to those who have met specific statutory standards. In North Carolina, the practice of physical therapy has been regulated since 1951. The Physical Therapy Practice Act specifies the qualifications that applicants for licensure must possess, and the Board spends a considerable amount of time reviewing applications for compliance with those requirements.
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Ethics codes establish an ideological framework with which all professionals in that profession can agree at some level. It is a framework for professionals to resolve ethical dilemmas, and it provides a distinctive language that gives a professional a unique sense of belonging.
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We have an obligation as regulators to make sure that the practitioners that we license are trusted by the people that they treat. Too often, the remediation that we choose to use is a Band-Aid for what we have perceived to be the problem when the problem is actually much larger and much more pervasive.
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This article discusses the issues involved in ethical decision making for healthcare providers and gives a model that can be used by healthcare providers in making tough decisions.
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Ethics remediation is a huge challenge. We know something was done wrong, but the ethical dimensions of the professional character reflected by that violation can be very subtle, very pervasive. It’s very hard to identify for a regulatory board. It would be relatively simple to discuss the statutes that individuals have violated. What we need to examine, though, are the underpinning of ethical judgment within any of these cases.
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This article discusses a presentation that the Massachusetts Board of Allied Health Professionals gives to licensees about the ten top reasons PTs and PTAs have been disciplined in that state.