Ethics in emergency services : a case study of values mismatch

Members of Emergency Medical Service undertake complex and stressful tasks often in life saving situations. The Australian College of Ambulance Professionals is concerned with the apparent change in ethics values among members and undertook a project of research to identify individual ethics profile of members and their perspective on organizational ethics and occurrences of ethical conflict. Due to the exploratory nature of this study two types of data (quantitative and qualitative) were gathered in two phases: phase one self-administrated questionnaire and phase two semi-structured interviews. \ud \ud The College surveyed its members using a specially designed questionnaire during their annual general meeting (AGM) and 58 useable questionnaires were returned out of 300 participants, providing a 20%response rate. In addition the college provided with a list of 15 names to be further contacted for the interviews, and 8 of them agreed to be interviewed. Results indicate that there is a gap between individual ethical decision-making approaches and organizational ethical decision-making in EMS. This has implications for EMS in how it maintains it organizational processes yet retains its professionals. Further, managing the stress and conflict levels of staff may be important in order to ensure current standard of care is maintained.\u