Abstract
Ethical misbehavior in the delivery of healthcare creates harm not only to individual
therapists and administrators who might choose to overstep ethical boundaries but
also, more broadly, causes harm to patients, to healthcare organizations, to professional
organizations, and ultimately to society. Both corporate codes of conduct and professional
codes of ethics are important, because they set standards of conduct and penalize
noncompliant or unethical conduct. The purposes of this article are (1) to differentiate
corporate compliance from ethics in a healthcare organization; (2) to explain the
application of ethics principles to organizational and professional behaviors; (3)
to discuss three important ethical issues (cultural competence, conflict of interest,
and employer demands); and (4) to emphasize that, whether applying a corporate code
of conduct or a professional code of ethics (or both), the integrity of each individual
is essential to ethical behavior. To illustrate these concepts, ASHA's Code of Ethics
is discussed in detail (including the ethics complaint adjudication process), and
hypothetical case studies are presented under the macro headings of Cultural Competence,
Conflict of Interest, and Employer Demands.
Keywords
compliance - employer demands - conflict of interest - cultural competence - fraud
and abuse
