A Guide to Establishing Ethics Committees in Behavioral Health Settings

Abstract

Ethical statements typically involve rules. All rules can vary in accuracy and specificity depending on the context to which they are applied. Codes of ethics often involve ethical rules that are written generally to cover the wide-ranging set of possible situations any one member of the profession may encounter. But, despite being written generally, codes of ethics are applied to specific situations that professional members encounter. The application of general rules to specific contexts can sometimes be challenging and complex. Healthcare organizations have several options to help their employees behave ethically. One approach is to appoint a single ethics coordinator (Brodhead & Higbee, 2012). In contrast, the dominant approach in most healthcare organizations is to develop an organizational ethics committee (Moon, 2009). Despite the popularity of the ethics committee in other professions, it is unknown the extent to which organizations that provide ABA services have established and operate ethics committees. Ethics coordinator roles and ethics committees each have benefits and drawbacks. This article reviews the benefits and drawbacks of appointing an ethics coordinator and establishing an ethics committee. And, for interested organizations, this article outlines the steps and considerations that organizations can use to guide the creation of an ethics committee.

Descriptive and normative ethical behavior appear to be functionally distinct

“…Organizations that want to understand and improve the ethical decision‐making of their employees could use the methods from Experiment 1 to collect data on how employees respond to ethical scenarios commonly encountered by employees in their organization. These data would allow the organization to determine how much variability in ethical decision‐making currently exists, and to identify guidelines or policies that would help employees make ethical decisions consistent with the organization's mission, values, and relevant to the unique contexts their employees face (Cox, 2020).…”

“…In addition to logical fallacies, the aforementioned argument is not convincing from a practical standpoint. Ethical decisions are not always black‐and‐white because ethical guidelines might conflict or ambiguously apply to a situation (for a full discussion see Cox, 2020). Here is where normative ethics might help.…”

COVID-19 Pandemic and Impact on Patients with Autism Spectrum Disorder

“…Although ABA services in some U.S. states were deemed “essential,” agencies lacked on-hand protective personal equipment (PPE) and policy guidelines to ensure safety of providers, individuals with ASD, and their households at the start of pandemic (Kornack et al, 2020 ). Some who switched to providing telehealth understood it was an atypical form of the service, and may have struggled with prioritizing in-person services amid potential risks (Colombo et al, 2020 ; Cox et al, 2020 ). For some children and adults with reliable verbal communication, phone and telehealth services anecdotally seem to have provided some ongoing and continued support.…”

Influence of Televisibility and Harm Probability on Clinical-Ethical Decision Making

“…In the current study, examining multidimensional choice across televisibility and harm allowed us to determine that the potential harm to a client was much more influential than the probability the choice would be observed on social media. In turn, ethics coordinators (Brodhead & Higbee, 2012) or ethics committees (Cox, 2020b;Leblanc et al, 2020) can focus their efforts and attention on contingencies likely to have the most impact on the decisions that practitioners make in the organizations that they serve.…”