Code of Ethics

WWRC Policy on Ethical Conduct

This policy provides direction to all WWRC staff in achieving ethical conduct in service provision to clients, business practices, marketing practices, and in upholding the ethics of individual professions.

The WWRC Policy on Ethical Conduct facilitates clients, stakeholders, vendors, and the public to be confident of receiving ethical treatment in all interactions with WWRC, the staff, and that we can all be more confident in how we treat each other.

WWRC Ethics Consultation Service

This service provides recommendations and support in evaluating ethical issues. The Consultation Team serves in a confidential, advisory, and non-binding capacity to all staff, clients, families, or vendors involved in active rehabilitation programs ensuring care of all persons which promotes:

Dignity
Privacy
Respect
Professionalism

The WWRC Ethics Consultation Service also provides education and training in ethics to:

Increase staff sensitivity to ethical issues, which arise in our day to day work
Create a forum for discussion and improve communication;
Present a framework of Principles for consistent ethical decision making including:
Beneficence: to benefit & help others;
Non-Maleficence: to prevent or avoid harm to others;
Autonomy: respect the right of others to be independent & make choices;
Justice: ensure that all persons are treated consistently and fairly.

Terminology

Altruism – Regard for others.
Autonomy – As most commonly defined, autonomy points in the direction of personal liberty of action in accordance with a plan chosen only by oneself.
Beneficence – Moral principle that one should help others further their important and legitimate interests, as those persons understand them (respecting autonomy) or as we conceive them (paternalism).
Confidentiality – The principle that one should keep one's promises about information from (re)disclosure.
Fidelity – The principle that one should keep one's promises.
Liberty – Freedom of human action, grounded in the principle of autonomy, consistent with the nature and dignity of human beings.
Nonmaleficence – Moral principle that one should refrain from harming others ("first, do no harm"). Compare with beneficence.
Paternalism – Stance that a person’s liberty is justifiably restricted to prevent self-harm, or to promote that person’s own well-being. Paternalism is an inherently liberty-limiting principle. It is grounded in a theory of impairment, viz., that an individual lacks sufficient facts or mental capacity to make a sound choice. It is sometimes defended by a theory of future consent: viz., that the person whose liberty is circumscribed will (or, at least in principle, could) eventually agree that the restriction was desirable, given better facts or cognitive capacity in future.
Rights – That which is due to individuals, based on core ethical principles.
Virtues – Positive ethical/character traits, such as benevolence, confidential-ness, fairness, faithfulness, gratefulness, non-deceptiveness (truthfulness), nonmalevolence. Virtues correspond to principles or duties: beneficence, confidentiality, justice, fidelity, gratitude, non-deception, nonmaleficence, etc.