Moral distress is a prevalent issue among healthcare professionals. Little is known about how to mitigate moral distress within the field of occupational therapy, but ethics education may reduce its impact by providing practitioners with tools for managing ethical problems. The purpose of this study is to explore the impact of ethics education on managing ethical problems among occupational therapy practitioners within the first five years of practice. Specifically, the investigators looked at the type of ethics education that occupational therapy practitioners received and how helpful they found it. This study used a pre-existing survey dataset that was collected in the Spring of 2020. Questions included what ethical problems practitioners have
encountered, ethics education they have received, how much they believed each kind of education helped them manage ethical problems, and how confident they felt responding to ethical issues in practice. Researchers analyzed data by using Spearman’s rho and Kendall’s Tau-b to evaluate the influence of the type of education on the level of helpfulness. Practitioners reported that the most helpful ethics education types were classroom discussions and case
studies; fieldwork mentorship, informal discussions, and experience; continuing education; and informal discussions with colleagues. Practitioners relied on personal experience, common knowledge, past education, supervisors, mentors, and colleagues within their organizations to manage ethical problems. They were confident in their ability to manage ethical problems, access the AOTA Code of Ethics and State Practice Act, and find setting policies pertaining to ethics. They were not confident in finding written resources or filing an ethics complaint. This study will add to the current literature by evaluating the effect of ethical education and how helpful it is
when occupational therapy practitioners are faced with ethical problems in the workplace.