Therapists who practice in the home and community face unique ethical challenges related to professional boundaries, dual roles, and confidentiality. Unlike office settings, which are designed to maximize privacy, therapists working in the home are often at the mercy of happenstance encounters, such as family members or neighbors who may walk into a session unannounced. It is much more difficult to protect sensitive and confidential information, yet therapists are ethically obligated to do so. This training provides guidance on anticipating and navigating ethical challenges in home and community-based services involving confidentiality, dual roles, and boundary crossings.
A goal of this course is to ground therapists’ decision-making process in the ethical codes established by all the major professional associations, such as NASW, ACA, APA, and AMFT. The webinars in this course cover the key differences between ethics, law, and morality, and provide a model for ethical decision-making. Thought-evoking dilemmas are provided to build critical thinking skills associated with challenging decisions that clinicians face working in our field, such as handling family invitations to sit with them for meals, attending events with them, or becoming friends on Instagram or Facebook.
This course is an edited updated version of a live-streamed training provided to a large group of intensive, in-home therapists on November 4th, 2020. Dan and Rebecca have many years of experience both as front-line therapists providing home-based treatment and as supervisors/program directors of community-based programs. They inject their rich experiences into the content of these webinars, making ethics both practical and engaging.
This is an introductory level course. The target audience is all behavioral health professionals working with children and adolescents.
Objectives:
As a result of participating in this training, participants will be able to:
- Define ethics in relation to law and morality.
- Recognize the unique ethical challenges found in delivering home and community-based services.
- State the difference between boundary crossings and boundary violations.
- Identify Five Steps to Ethical Decision Making.
- Name three ways to prevent a breach of confidentiality.
This course uses an online distance-learning self-paced format. It includes recorded audio, recorded video-based webinars, and selected readings. There are post-tests to ensure comprehension of the material. Participants can communicate with the instructors via the online moodle interface. Real-time communication with the instructor in our online, self-paced distance learning courses is not possible. However, participants can send an email to the instructor via the online moodle interface within the course and expect to receive a response within 48 hours. All course content, including post-tests, should take approximately two hours to complete.
Frequently Asked Questions
Visit our Self-Paced, Online Continuing Education Policies & FAQs for additional information regarding the CFBT online learning center, accommodations for disabilities, reporting problems with the course, instructions for viewing webinars, etc.