Professional Ethical Considerations Research Articles

Social Workers’ Professional Failures as Perceived by Welfare Bureau Managers within Arab Society in Israel

Abstract Social workers’ professional failures are considered inevitable occurrences. However, virtually all research on professional failure management relates to the healthcare field. The scant literature on professional failure does not give much weight to the profound implications of context on professional functioning. This pioneer study illustrates how important it is to consider the context to understand the daily workplace occurrence of social workers’ professional failures. The research traced social workers’ professional failures as perceived by welfare bureaus managers. A phenomenological approach elicited data from semi-structured in-depth interviews with twenty Arab welfare bureaus managers in Israel. Findings indicated that the managers encountered a lot of ‘minor’ individual and collective failures in different dimensions, and understood failure as a transient episode, mostly trivial and understandable. The main criterion for failure was damage attributed to a particular intervention. Responsibility for failure was not usually seen as stemming from the social workers’ faulty professional-ethical considerations, rather it was attributed to factors associated with the establishment: lack of appropriate resources and non-culture-sensitive policies. Managers coped creatively with what they defined as failures, preserving their profession’s inalienable assets with a ‘non-confrontational’ policy while ensuring individual learning from the failure, to prevent future repetition.

Applications of codes of teacher ethics in the context of anthropogenic climate change

ABSTRACT Current school students, citizens of the future, will inherit urgent, complex, ethically challenging real world problems affecting social and environmental sustainability, such as anthropogenic climate change. Therefore, they must be prepared at school to understand the diverse issues underpinning anthropogenic climate change so they can make informed decisions at voting age. School teachers charged with this task, require professional ethical sensitivity contiguous to politically laden, complex topics such as climate change. This article documents the ethical dilemmas perceived by 98 final year prospective teachers in teaching about climate change, after the completion of a course on ethical professional practice. Results show three quarters of the prospective teachers in this study perceived ethical dilemmas in the context of teaching about anthropogenic climate change. They rationalised their views based on a range of professional ethical considerations.

Religious Education Teacher between Biography, Habitus and Power : Professional Ethical Perspectives

This study mark a high complexity of the field, which is further enhanced by the fact, that these discussions are transposed into religious education and professionalism research relating to religious education teachers. It seriously considers very unique semantics and practice of leadership emerge then, crosswise and as a background to the educational hermeneutics. Obviously, besides didactic implications, professional ethical implications in an elementary sense are also at play here. The researcher will proceed in four steps: Firstly, I examine aspects of professionalism theory, into which, secondly, professional ethical considerations are entered in their significance for the topic of leadership, then deepen this through discourse-theoretical considerations before finally, fourthly, perspectives are opened up.

Middle Theory in Professional Ethics

In professional ethics, focus on ethical theory fails to offer practical advice and focus on individual cases fails to develop adequate ethical understanding. There is a wide gap between abstract moral theories and concrete professional cases. To understand professional ethics, we must pay more attention to this gap and the middle level of theory that we find there. This middle theory brings abstract principles closer to practical cases by considering and incorporating the goals, circumstances, customs and other established social practices and compromises of particular professions. Understanding the complex systems of individual professions is quite important morally as such systems can alter our ethical duties dramatically. Therefore, adequate consideration of professional ethics requires a thorough understanding of philosophical ethics and of the nature of the specific profession concerned. However, recognizing the importance of this middle area will require us to reconsider how we teach, and who teaches, professional ethics.

Effect of Professional Ethics on Reducing Medical Errors from the Viewpoint of Faculty Members in Medical School of Tabriz University of Medical Sciences

Background: Professionalism and adherence to ethics and professional standards are among the most important topics in medical ethics that can play a role in reducing medical errors. This paper examines and evaluates the effect of professional ethics on reducing medical errors from the viewpoint of faculty members in the medical school of the Tabriz University of Medical Sciences. Methods: in this cross-sectional descriptive study, faculty members of the Tabriz University of Medical Sciences were the statistical population from whom 105 participants were randomly selected through simple random sampling. A questionnaire was used, to examine and compare the self-assessed opinions of faculty members in the internal, surgical, pediatric, gynecological, and psychiatric departments. The questionnaires were completed by a self-assessment method and the collected data was analyzed using SPSS 21. Results: Based on physicians’ opinions, professional ethical considerations and its three domains and aspects have a significant role in reducing medical errors and crimes. The mean scores (standard deviations) of the managerial, knowledge and communication skills and environmental variables were respectively 46.7 (5.64), 64.6 (8.14) and 16.2 (2.97) from the physicians’ viewpoints. The significant factors with highest scores on the reduction of medical errors and crimes in all three domains were as follows: in the managerial skills variable, trust, physician’s sense of responsibility against the patient and his/her respect for patients’ rights; in the knowledge and communication skills domain, general competence and eligibility as a physician and examination and diagnosis skills; and, last, in the environmental domain, the sufficiency of trainings in ethical issues during education and their satisfaction with basic needs. Conclusion: Based on the findings of this research, attention to the improvement of communication, management and environment skills should be a main focus of programs in the teaching of professional ethics in universities.

Professional Ethics in Context

The complexities of professional ethics are best understood and interpreted within their sociohistorical context. This paper focuses on the experience of 20 rural psychologists from across Canada, a context rife with demographic and practice characteristics that may instigate ethical issues. Employing hermeneutic phenomenology, these qualitative research results are indicative of professional struggles that impacted the participants' experience of professional ethics and raised key questions about policy and practise. Concerns regarding competition highlight potential professional vulnerability, beget the idea of fostering general psychological practice, and question the role of professional bodies in addressing rural shortages. Dependency on government funding models and decisions highlights the benefits and medical cost-offset effect of psychological services' role in funded medical care. The controversial prescriptive authority debate for psychologists raises myriad concerns that are particularly salient to rural practitioners. These include changes to training and practice, with risks of psychopharmacology gaining prominence over behavioural health interventions. National inconsistencies in level of registration add to the growing shortage of practitioners. Finally, the results illuminate the need for advocacy to move beyond the literature and into public policy to increase public awareness, decrease the stigma of mental illness, and develop rural Canadian psychology. Although limited to this study, these results allowed for a fuller and more robust understanding of rural practice in consideration of professional ethics, which may inform policy, science, or ethical clinical practice.

But Can It Travel?

Since the traumas of the last quarter of the 20th century forced all professions into the light of public scrutiny, we have seen the destruction of the parochial boundaries of the ethical understandings of the past, and the development of a cosmopolitan professional ethics. It is now understood that we have to have an ethics that travels well, whose principles operate with equal force and plausibility in all disciplines. Without good passports, principles become locked into their own disciplines, Ethics as a subject loses its integrity, and every profession has an excellent reason to insist that “their” ethics have nothing to do with the rest of the world. Consideration of professional ethics as a whole shows that the general principles that we use travel very well indeed, and rapidly smokes out those that do not. “The Doctrine of Double Effect” is one of the non-travelers; from that fact we explore the possibility that the Doctrine is radically misconceived even in its home discipline of­medicine.

Caught in the middle again: professional ethical considerations in genetic testing for health risks.

Genotyping tests for molecular mutations associated with clinical syndromes increasingly allow clinicians to identify health risks before clinical problems occur, sometimes making prevention possible. The clinical use of these tests, however, can create moral problems for families and serious health policy challenges for communities. Those issues, in turn, complicate the professional ethics of genetic testing and counseling. Investigators working with families in gene-identification studies have already encountered these complications in the research setting and their experiences may help in the development of a clinical ethic for genetic testing. In addition to questions about the predictive significance of particular genotypes, three other sets of ethical considerations are becoming important to professional decision-making about genetic testing: the psycho-social impact of testing, the patient's privileges with respect to testing, and the potential for effective prevention following testing. Underlying all these considerations are basic lessons from the research setting on how clinicians should interpret genetic testing for patients, given the heavily deterministic meanings that they have been taught thus far.

Health and safety ethics for management.

All employers are ethically required to provide a safe and healthy workplace for their employees. Health and safety professionals (HSP) may often be employed either full-time or part-time to achieve this end. The HSP should be viewed as a non-partisan provider of safety and health services at the workplace. He is equally on the side of management and worker in discharging his duties. His primary goal is to achieve a safe and healthy workplace and to improve the health of the workforce. Ethical dilemmas may surface in the course of the HSP's work largely because there may be occasions when there are conflicts of interest and loyalty derived from the different roles of the HSP. The best way to resolve such dilemmas is to prevent them from arising. However, when this is not possible, management's understanding of the professional ethical considerations of the HSP will help to improve the working relationship and professional results of these staff. Several aspects in the HSP's work require management's understanding. These include subjects such as communicating information on staff-medical examinations to management, and the disclosure of commercially confidential information to assess related health risks. Management should also be aware that guidelines have been developed by a number of professional health and safety organizations for their members. In the instances when answers to ethical questions cannot be resolved, these guidelines can be consulted, in conjunction with discussions with senior HSP colleagues.