Social work influence on interdisciplinary ethical decision making in health care settings.

Abstract

Because of structural and philosophical changes in health care, social work practitioners are having to interact more with other practitioners in health care settings. Many of those interactions are interdisciplinary and often involve an understanding of the application of professional values and ethics. The authors have suggested that social workers' influence on ethical decision making is correlated directly to their ability to contribute to those decisions. In their study, the authors tested five independent variables and one dependent variable to show the factors that are related significantly to social workers' influence on ethical decision-making processes in multidisciplinary health care settings.