Provisionally approved for Fall 2022 July 9, 2002
RESPONSIBILITIES AND ETHICS IN HUMAN SERVICES
RATIONALE: Human service workers shoulder the responsibility of assessing and managing client risk, safety and autonomy. Such practitioners include human service case workers and managers, social workers, nurses, and other staff. Work settings may be institutional or community-based. Consumers/clients may be those served by human service, mental health, criminal justice, child welfare and other service organizations. Everyday, workers encounter difficult situations in which the right thing for the worker to do is not always clear. Further, workers often lack specific training and regular support in this area. Ethical conflicts are posed by conflicting roles and duties involved with case management, discharge planning, high risk screening, crisis intervention and other human service functions. It is important for practitioners working with all client/consumer groups to understand and respond to ethical and legal issues that arise with individual clients, families and practitioners.
COMPETENCY: Can appropriately reflect on ethical responsibilities to
clients, with an understanding of ethical concepts and safeguards relevant
to providing service to a particular group or population of clients.
CRITERIA:
1. Identify a client or group of clients who will be the focus of the competency, the nature of proposed help/intervention, the agency or community context, and the professional context.
2. Identify and describe ethical conflicts that have been or could be encountered by a practitioner in working with the identified client or group of clients.
3. Identify and describe professional codes of ethics and/or the ethical safeguards in place to protect clients and to guide resolutions of ethical conflicts you have identified, and analyze the strengths and limitations of the ethical safeguards in resolving the conflicts in your identified cases.
4. Identify and describe more universal ethical concepts relevant to the ethical conflict situations you have identified, such as concepts of human rights, public welfare, and social and economic justice, discuss the relationships between these more universal ethical concepts and the professional codes of ethics and/or ethical safeguards you have identified, and analyze the strengths and limitations of the more universal ethical concepts in resolving the conflicts you have identified.
5. Develop a case study in which you formulate a resolution to the specific ethical conflict.
6. Evaluate the resolution you arrived at in your case study, especially in relation to whether the professional codes of ethics and ethical safeguards are adequate or inadequate for the conflict situation in your case study, and whether the more universal ethical concepts are adequate or inadequate for the conflict situation.
PORTFOLIO LINK: You are expected to use the Level III Communications
Portfolio writing standards as guidelines for the essays required by this
competency. At a minimum, writing should demonstrate Level II Communications
Portfolio standards. The written paper(s) that you produce for this competency,
therefore, may be used for an appropriate Portfolio III essay option.
STANDARDS:
1. For Criterion 1, the choice of client or group of clients, the setting, and the kind of help must be approved by an evaluator.
2. For Criterion 2, you must identify and describe three ethical conflicts. At least two of the conflicts that you identify must be chosen from the following:
3. For Criterion 3, you must describe the ethical safeguards in place for each of the three ethical conflicts you identified for Criteria 2 and Standard 2. The ethical safeguards should include (but are not limited to) legal mandates such as mandated reporting of abuse, codes of ethics of the institution, and/or profession, licensing requirements, grievance committees, and human rights committees. Since ethical safeguards, such as Codes of Ethics and licensing, will differ for different job descriptions and professions, some case situations may require comparing two or more different Codes of Ethics (e.g., codes of ethics for psychologists, nurses, social workers, probation officers), as well as licensing regulations. Some relevant professional organizations with established codes of ethics are the American Psychological Association (APA), the National Association of Social Workers (NASW), the American Medical Association (AMA), the Council for Standards in Human Service Education (CSHSE), the National Organization for Human Service Education (NOHSE), the American Counseling Association (ACA), the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy (AAMFT), and the National Academy of Certified Clinical Mental Health Counselors (NACCMHC).
4. For Criterion 4, you should select each of your three ethical conflicts and the relevant code of ethics you identified for it, identify one or more relevant ethical concepts that are more universal (such as human rights, public welfare, social and/or economic justice), summarize the main ideas in the more universal ethical concepts you have selected to demonstrate that you comprehend them clearly, and then analyze the consistencies and/or inconsistencies between the specific code of ethics and the more universal ethical concept(s) you have identified.
5. For Criterion 5, your case study should be based on one of the three ethical conflict situations you have identified. Your case study, therefore, should include discussions of the following:
6. For Criterion 6, your evaluation of the effectiveness of the resolution proposed in your case study should include appropriate references to professional codes of ethics and more universal ethical concepts, and should also make reference to relevant literature on ethical issues in the field. Your evaluation may also describe ways in which ethical safeguards could be strengthened to better serve clients and service providers in the area you have been examining. Students with direct experience in the field should relate such experiences to their evaluation of ethical efficacy.
EXAMPLES OF DEMONSTRATION:
1. Prior Learning: You have served for several years as a nurse at a community hospital and served on the ethics committee of the hospital. On this committee, you helped to formulate Guidelines for consultation on ethical conflicts involving end of life decisions, as well as helping to process a wide variety of ethical dilemmas brought to the Committee by practitioners at the hospital. In working to formulate the guidelines, you read several texts on ethical theory, as well as reading about end of life technologies. You meet with an evaluator, to whom you present a portfolio of materials you developed and used on the Committee.
2. Independent Learning: States are varied in their responses to driving reassessment for people as they age. The American Medical Association changed their ethical guidelines in 1999 to permit physicians to notify the Department of Motor Vehicles of patients whose diagnosis might lead to unsafe driving. You decide to reset this issue, with focus on the ethical conflicts it can and does present to older drivers, their families, elder advocacy groups, physicians and law enforcement personnel.
3. Course: You enroll in a class in which you focus on a variety of ethical conflicts, including ones that class members choose to share and ones provided by reading material in the course.
4. Field Project: You are helping an agency develop guidelines for ethical and legal issues for their case workers. You research the APA ethics code, the NASW ethics code, and the Massachusetts state laws regarding confidentiality, record-keeping, referral, and treatment, among other issues. You develop drafts for Consent to Treatment, Confidentiality, Release of Information, and for Referral Information forms based upon the guidelines and laws that are in effect in Massachusetts. You discuss the ways which ethical issues and legal requirements shape these forms and the ways which you must inform your clients and co-workers about their rights and obligations.