Affiliations: Community Rehabilitation and Disability Studies, Department of Community Health Sciences, Cumming School of Medicine, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada
Correspondence:
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Address for correspondence: Gregor Wolbring, Department of Community Health Sciences, TRW Building 3rd Floor, 3330 Hospital Drive NW, Calgary, AB, T2N 4N1, Canada. Tel.: +1 403 210 7083; E-mail: [email protected].
Abstract: BACKGROUND:Return-to-work (RTW)/back-to-work (BTW) interventions that are designed to rehabilitate individuals impaired from fulfilling employment roles are facing challenges. Ethics discourses, including ethics theories, principles and concepts, are meant to give guidance on what one ought to do or not to do and RTW professionals could use them to respond to their challenges. OBJECTIVE:A scoping review was performed to investigate to what extent 33 ethics concepts, theories, and principles are employed in RTW/BTW academic literature, and to what extent RTW/BTW is engaged with in ethics linked academic journals. METHODS:Three academic databases were searched, and 147 article results were extracted from our literature review to be thematically analyzed. RESULTS:Searches with n = 11 ethics concepts and n = 4 ethics theories generated results. The content of 20 RTW/BTW article results demonstrated conceptual engagement between RTW and ethics discourses. Only one article in ethics-related journals conceptually engaged with RTW/BTW. CONCLUSION:Ethics theories and principles were not used extensively in RTW/BTW academic literature and RTW/BTW is a topic under-engaged within ethics-related journals. Our findings indicate opportunities for further research, like conducting interviews, to better understand our findings and how to respond to them.
Keywords: Back to work, ethics theories, ethics concepts, ethical reasoning, conceptual engagement
