Physical Therapy Ethical Dilemmas

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Alyssa Dymond
HEPR 505: Professional Issues
Professor Caroline Booth
Midterm Paper
10/22/15
The biggest ethical decision Physical Therapists have to face today deal with third party payers and insurance coverage of therapy services. There are instances in which a patient is prohibited from a particular modality or physical therapy service due to the inability of insurance covering the expense. The Physical Therapist then has to determine whether it is ethical to forego the service for not wanting the patient to have to pay for it or still providing the service knowing the out of pocket expense to the patient. In addition, some insurance companies only will cover a particular amount of visits. This inadvertently limits the number of treatment …show more content…
One such model is the RIPS decision model, which has four steps that can be followed in order to resolve ethical and professional issues. The first step is to recognize and define the ethical issue and analyze the realm, individual process, and type of ethical situation. In this case, the ethical issue is the lack of coverage by third party payers for particular rehab interventions. The next step is to reflect on the issue and interpret all of the information from the previous step. The third step is to decide on the right thing to do. Finally, the last step is to implement, evaluate, and re-assess the issue1. For the above case, the ethical issue is the lack of coverage by third party payers for particular rehab interventions. The realm is organizational/institutional because insurance institutions are creating policies that are lacking in coverage. The individual process is moral courage as the physical therapist must make a decision of whether or not to provide uncovered interventions. Finally, the situation would be classified as distress because the therapist knows the intervention needs to be covered but does not have the authorization or empowerment to pay for the

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