How physiotherapists perceive,interpret, and respond to the ethical dimensions of practice: A qualitative study

The profile and reach of physiotherapy has expanded in areas of extended scope of practice, and broader engagement with population needs beyond the individual treatment encounter. These changes raise increasingly complex ethical challenges evidenced by growth in physiotherapy-based ethics studies and discussions. This paper examines how a broad cross section of Australian physiotherapists perceive, interpret, and respond to ethical challenges in their work contexts and how professional codes of conduct are used in their practice. Using an interpretive qualitative methodology, purposive sampling of 88 members of national clinical special interest groups were recruited for focus group discussions. Narrative-based and thematic data analysis identified ethical challenges as emerging from specific clinical contexts, and influenced by health organizations, funding policies, workplace relationships, and individually held perspectives. Five themes were developed to represent these findings: (1) the working environment, (2) balancing diverse needs and expectation, (3) defining ethics, (4) striving to act ethically, and (5) talking about ethics. The results portray a diverse and complex ethical landscape where therapists encounter and grapple with ethical questions emerging from the impact of funding models and policies affecting clinical work, expanding boundaries and scope of practice and changing professional roles and relationships. Codes of conduct were described as foundational ethical knowledge but not always helpful for “in the moment” ethical decision-making. Based on this research, we suggest how codes of conduct, educators, and professional associations could cultivate and nurture ethics capability in physiotherapy practitioners for these contemporary challenges.     

Measurement challenges in shared decision making: putting the ‘patient’ in patient‐reported measures

Measuring clinicians' shared decision‐making (SDM) performance is a key requirement given the intensity of policy interest in many developed countries – yet it remains one of the most difficult methodological challenges, which is a concern for many stakeholders. In this Viewpoint Article, we investigate the development of existing patient‐reported measures (PRMs) of SDM identified in a recent review. We find that patients were involved in the development of only four of the 13 measures. This lack of patient involvement in PRM development is associated with two major threats to content validity, common to all 13 PRMs of SDM: (i) an assumption of patient awareness of ‘decision points’ and (ii) an assumption that there is only one decision point in each healthcare consultation. We provide detailed examples of these threats and their impact on accurate assessment of SDM processes and outcomes, which may hamper efforts to introduce incentives for SDM implementation. We propose cognitive interviewing as a recommended method of involving patients in the design of PRMs in the field of SDM and provide a practical example of this approach.