[Interprofessional ethical shared values for an integral healthcare]

Area of Science:

• Healthcare Ethics
• Professional Codes of Conduct
• Inter-professional Collaboration

Background:

• Modern healthcare necessitates collaboration among diverse professionals.
• Codes of ethics articulate the core values of various health professions.
• Identifying shared ethical values is crucial for effective teamwork.

Purpose of the Study:

• To identify ethical values common to medical, nursing, physiotherapy, podiatry, and psychology professions.
• To propose a quantifiable method for assessing the ethical consensus among healthcare professionals.
• To support the development of inter-professional teams for comprehensive healthcare delivery.

Main Methods:

• Reviewed codes of ethics from five distinct healthcare professions.
• Classified identified ethical values into those shared (VIP) and not shared (VP) across all professions.
• Developed a Likert-type survey to estimate the acceptance of common ethical values.

Main Results:

• Identified 30 distinct ethical values across the reviewed professional codes.
• Confirmed the existence of formally shared ethical values within professional conduct codes.
• Demonstrated the feasibility of measuring the ethical values accepted by healthcare professionals.

Conclusions:

• Shared ethical values are identifiable in professional codes of conduct.
• A quantifiable method exists to assess the ethical consensus among health professionals.
• Measuring ethical values can enhance human resource management for inter-professional teams.