KNOWLEDGE, ATTITUDES AND ETHICAL VALUES OF STUDENTS FROM THE OCCUPATIONAL THERAPY DEGREE AT CENTRO SUPERIOR DE ESTUDIOS UNIVERSITARIOS LA SALLE, IN MADRID

Background: Health professions’ roles and practice are largely linked to institutional expectations and to professional practice (AJOT, 2010). Occupational therapists face frequently bioethical dilemmas, which makes it... [ view full abstract ]

Background:
Health professions’ roles and practice are largely linked to institutional expectations and to professional practice (AJOT, 2010). Occupational therapists face frequently bioethical dilemmas, which makes it necessary to incorporate both personal righteousness and commitments. These aspects will frame an organized body for professional practice (Galán, 2013), and many of them can be achieve in the university (Feito, 2012).

Method:
A cross, prospective, quantitative study was performed using a Likert questionnaire for Occupational Therapy degree students at Centro Superior de Estudios Universitarios La Salle, in Madrid.
Objective: To identify knowledge, attitudes and ethical values of students.

Results:
Students presented good legislation and ethics related knowledge. We have to highlight, that students consider “ethical” practice those actions directly related to patient’s disability, accepting as “right” actions those that will not be considered ethics if the person would have not the disability. Furthermore, they consider that their personal ethics dependents on stablished professional standards.

Conclusion:
Individuals with high cognitive capacities or abilities would have greater moral worth that those with lower acumen. It’s important to highlight the tendency of some students, even though they were not a great number, who accept as “right” those founded questions from ethical relativism: “individual by individual and moment by moment”.

Application to practice:
Social transformation in areas such as social reasoning, development of new technologies and their incorporation to medical and scientific field make necessary a bioethical readiness and appropriate occupational therapist training of those in educational programs.