AOTA Code Of Ethics Analysis

Begin seeing a new patient, do everything possible to help them, discharge them to allow them to live out their life. Seems like an easy enough process that many different therapy disciplines follow. Now what happens when the duration of time that the patient is receiving services grows to a cumbersome length but their progress has started to slow? At what point does a line need to be drawn in the sand about whether to continue to provide services to particular patients.
With every patient case comes a variety of circumstances that could influence a multitude of ethical decisions that a therapist must make. For the purpose of this paper, there will be a focus on the discipline of occupational therapy providing services to a pediatric patient
Within this code of ethics, they attempt to spell out all of the duty bound pledges that one takes when practicing the occupation. Although this situation is not specifically spelled out in the AOTA code of ethics, there a few sections that guide professionals through what to do in situations similar to this. The first of these sections that deals with this topic is entitled beneficence, which is balancing benefits over risk through doing good (Pozgar, 2016). It is stated in this section that the reevaluation and assessments that are provided to the patient must be done in a timely fashion so that it can be determined whether the set goals are being achieved and whether the intervention plans should be revised (American Occupational Therapy Association, 2015). Through this process, therapist need to be able to track progress and if the improvement is not being seen, then there needs to be a change in the intervention plan, even if that change includes termination of treatment. The beneficence section of the American Occupational Therapy Association (2015) code of ethics also states to “terminate occupational therapy services in collaboration with the service recipient or responsible party when the services are no longer beneficial”. Services are no longer beneficial when there is no longer improvement being seen in the patient. However, the part in the AOTA code of ethics that provides a caveat for preventing backlash from premature discharge is found in the nonmaleficence section. This section states that service cannot be abandoned and that a proper, appropriate transition period needs to be implemented when service is not able to be provided (American Occupational Therapy Association, 2015). Through the analysis of these statements it can be concluded that once it has been made clear that services are not beneficial they need to be