There wasn’t room for ‘Boundary issues’ in the Winter 10 issue of Speech & Language Therapy in Practice – but don’t despair if you missed your ethics fix, as I have just published an articlewhich explores the use of the Seedhouse grid.

‘Communicating ethics’ is a collaborative effort from Professor Jois Stansfield of Manchester Metropolitan University and Jane Handley, one of her former students and now a practising therapist.

When Jane was in her final year she found a series of workshops on a case-based approach to ethical reasoning very helpful. As she says, we frequently need to make decisions that “are often difficult to resolve because they present ethical dilemmas which cannot be reasoned out with logic alone. To achieve the best possible outcome, it seems that a moral judgement is also required.”

The article explores how Jane used David Seedhouse’s Ethical grid with a hypothetical client, Bryan (5), who has profound physical and cognitive disabilities. His parents are looking for a second opinion, as they do not believe sufficient time is being allocated to his feeding in school or in respite. This was the first Manchester Metropolitan University speech and language therapy case to be presented in Seedhouse’s Values Exchange, an online approach to ethical decision-making.