Affiliations: [a] Department of Rehabilitation Psychology and Neuropsychology, Rehabilitation Institute of Michigan, 261 Mack Boulevard, Detroit, MI 48201-2417 USA | [b] The Ethics Institute, University of Detroit Mercy, 8200 West Outer Drive, P.O. Box 19900, Detroit, MI 48219-3599 USA
Correspondence:
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Corresponding author.
Abstract: The ethics committee, initially developed in the acute care setting, can serve to address the particular issues and difficult dilemmas that characterize rehabilitation. The same mechanisms of educational programs, policy development, and case consultation serve to address ethical issues in rehabilitation as well as acute care settings. However, ethical issues in rehabilitation differ greatly from those common in acute care settings. Rehabilitation ethics committees must be prepared to consider issues that include the following: procurement of informed consent for services that are rarely discrete, variable levels of program participation, complex cost-benefit analyses that are subject to less relevant values and biases, unequal access to services, limits of confidentiality, and family/caregiver issues. These difficult issues, peculiar to rehabilitation and made much more complex when patients exhibit cognitive deficits, provide an opportunity for rigorously testing the utility of ethical theory in a complex medical arena.
