Below is a screen shot of my final evaluation from my first Level II Fieldwork. As indicated by her rating me as "exceeds standards", as well as her comments below, I feel as though I demonstrated ethical behavior in practice. Also, below the picture is a description of an ethical dilemma that I encountered at Baptist Memorial Hospital and how I solved it.
Ethical Dilemma of Autonomy and Confidentiality
For my second Level II Fieldwork experience, I was at Baptist Memorial Hospital in Memphis. Being that Baptist is one of the largest hospitals in Memphis, I see many familiar faces of people from my home town, Ripley. People from my hometown know that I am doing a rotation at Baptist (the typical small town, everyone knows everyone), and they will sometimes confront me with, “Oh you are at Baptist, have you seen …?”, or “I heard you are at Baptist, can you see how ---is doing?”. Although they do not mean any harm by these questions, I still have to tell them that I cannot give out any information about the patient. I have also seen familiar names on the occupational therapy list on multiple occasions, and sometimes I am assigned to them. I have to make the judgment call of whether or not it is ethical for me to treat the patient based on my relationship with them. I talked to my fieldwork educator about this, and she said that a good way to decipher whether I should treat them or not is thinking about if it would make me or the patient uncomfortable if I were to have to help them to the bathroom or get dressed. If I think it would make them feel embarrassed or self-conscious, then I usually request to be assigned to someone else. My fieldwork educator explained that I would probably encounter this often being from a small town nearby, but as long as I do not share any information about my patient’s status or medical course at Baptist, then it should not be an ethical issue.