Required Continuing Education in Ethics
and Professional Responsibility

The Texas Board of Physical Therapy Examiners has issued the following policy statement on the content of ethics and professional responsibility courses taken to satisfy the requirement for continuing education taken for renewal purposes beginning January 2001.

The ethics course should include at a minimum the following components:

• The theoretical basis for ethical decision-making
• APTA's Code of Ethics and Guide for Professional Conduct
• Legal standards of behavior (including but not limited to practice acts and rules)
• Hypothetical case scenarios

The Board also provided the following additional information:

• The Board requires a minimum of 2 contact hours of ethics/professional responsibility CE.
• The ethics contact hours may be a component of a larger course.
• A licensee may submit more than 2 hours in ethics/professional responsibility for renewal purposes.

Ethics: A set of standards by which a particular group or community decides to regulate its behavior -- to distinguish what is legitimate or acceptable in pursuit of their aims from what is not. (a definition of ethics as applied to a specific activity or field, e.g. bioethics, business ethics, physical therapy)

How this policy will be applied

Each application for continuing education approval will be analyzed to determine if it may qualify as ethics/professional responsibility CE. Those applications that include all four components as required in the Board's policy statement will receive a "supplemental ethics approval" and may be used by PTs and PTAs to meet the ethics/professional responsibility CE requirement. Those courses will be tagged in the database of approved continuing education programs as approved for the ethics CE requirements.

Course sponsors

If your course has been approved as meeting the ethics CE requirements, you will receive a supplemental ethics approval letter and participants may claim the course for their ethics CE requirement. 
If you do not receive this letter, the course does not meet the ethics CE requirement and participants MAY NOT claim the course for their ethics CE requirement.  Ethics-related courses that have already been approved (for general continuing education) can be reviewed under these new guidelines. Contact Tiffany Downey at the TPTA Chapter Office if you would like your course reviewed for the supplemental ethics approval.  
 

Licensees

You must have 2 hours of CE in ethics and professional responsibility when you renew your license beginning January 2001. (The effective date has been postponed from September 2000 as previously published by the Board.)  Remember that not all courses with "ethics" and/or "professional responsibility" in the title will be applicable for the required ethics/professional responsibility course.  Ask the sponsor if the course has received the supplemental ethics approval. If the sponsor cannot produce a letter verifying that the course has been approved as an ethics/professional responsibility course, then the course probably cannot be claimed as the required course on your license renewal.  The online Approved Continuing Education database will be updated to identify those courses that meet the ethics CE requirement. Refer to the key on the search results page to identify courses that meet the ethics requirement.