Ethics in Physical Therapy
... illegal acts. This means that if they are aware of any unethical acts, they are obligated to report them. The eight and final principle is that they must participate in efforts to address the health needs of the public (Code of Ethics). These principles have been addresses, but there are still many problems in the system. To assess some of the problems that therapists feel are important, many surveys are conducted. One survey by the United Kingdom National Health Service wanted to compare ethical contexts and themes, so they sent a structured questionnaire to many different physical therapy groups around the country. The therapists filled out the questionnaires and the results found that the most common ethical problems among therapists in the United Kingdom were dangerous behaviors in patients and unprofessional staff behavior. Their second biggest concern was resource limitations and treatment effectiveness. These findings suggested that educators of future physical therapists need to make students aware of work settings and the interdisciplinary nature of employment as well as principles held by individual therapists (Barnitt). The American Physical Therapy Association also conducted a study to identify current ethical issues and also issues that may be faced in the future by therapists. They used a technique called the Delphi technique, where a panel of experts was selected and the experts responded to questionnaires stating their concerns with ethics. The experts narrowed their concerns down to three categories: patient rights and welfare, professional issues, and business factors. The experts chose six patient rights and welfare issues, five professional issues, and five relating to business factors to be the most important. The first issues addressed, the patients' rights and welfare issues, were the primary concern of the panel of experts. The issues at hand focused on interactions, confidentiality, sexuality, and consensual issues between doctors and patients. Any interaction between a doctor and patient should be understood and clear. Sexual activities between doctor and patient should be prohibited, and all interactions should be ensured as confidential. The second issues faced were professional ones. These issues dealt primarily with policies and relations between health professionals. Some issues listed in this category were maintaining clinical competence, supervising personnel, taking care of the environment, and reporting any misconduct of others. Therapists should be competent in their work, their personnel should be supervised at all times, their environment should be sanitary and clean, and they should feel obligated to report and wrong doing of their peers. The third and final category discussed was business and economics. The issues outlined in this category included appropriate fees, advertising, endorsement of equipment, exploitive business relationships, and billing fraud. Physical therapists are expected to charge appropriate fees for their services, they are expected to advertise fairly and truthfully, they should endorse equipment without exploiting themselves or others, and they should bill fairly and justly for their services (Triezenberg and Purtilo). A few of the future ethical problems they outlined are the over-utilization of services, the protection of the patient’s rights, the justification of the appropriate fees for the services rendered, the ethical guidelines for the use of human subjects in research, and responsibilities of physical therapists. The over-utilization of services would be using the service too much. The protection of the patient’s rights includes privacy issues. The justification of the appropriate fees for the services rendered would be proper billing. The ethical guidelines for the use of human subjects in research includes making sure the human subjects are not harmed in any way, and are treated fairly. The responsibilities of physical therapists include their duty to respond to environmental issues, as well as social issues (Triezenberg and Purtilo). Since one of the main problems addressed by the therapists surveyed was the behavior among their co-workers and patients, some of these behaviors should be examined and explained. The elderly are one of the largest groups of people that partake of the care of Physical Therapists. Sometimes, though, their care is not quality service and they can often be cheated out of money. One study on Physical and Occupational Therapy in Nursing found that even though patients received the therapy needed and their wellness improved because of it, 13% of the patients were not properly billed, and 4% were not documented properly in the patient’s medical records. Some reasons for being billed improperly were that the people providing the services were not qualified to do so, therefore they were charging for a job that they were not authorized to do. Another report, "Physical and Occupational Therapy in Nursing Homes: Cost of Improper Billings to Medicare," estimated amounts of money that were billed or documented improperly during a one year period ending June 30, 1998. They estimated that $1 billion for improperly billed physical and occupational therapy and $331 million for improperly documented physical and occupational therapy was paid by Medicare to these workers (How to Fix Therapy Services). The government has taken many steps to fix these problems. The main government agency for these problems, Medicare, has done many eva...