Ross Woods, Rev. Jan '11, Jan '14, Dec '17, Aug '20
The basics
You also need to comply with the ethical standards of your organization and the community services sector. These specifically include supporting other staff and maintaining appropriate boundaries.
Ethical standards often extend outside the workplace and outside work hours. For example, leaking client's private information is still wrong if you do it in your own time at home. It is worth your while exploring the ramifications of breaches of duty of care, confidentiality, ethical guidelines and other relevant policies and legislation.
Here are the basics that affect you most. Some of them are now in legislation, such as the Privacy Act.
Keep personal information confidential unless the client has authorized otherwise. This includes not telling your spouse or close friends outside work.
Be client-centred. It's not about you; it's about what benefits your client.
Show respect for other people and treat them equitably.
Support other staff and back them up when they need it. Don't join in gossip.
Be empathetic and don't judge people. Clients spot a superior attitude very quickly. They need to know you care and are working in their best interests.
Use easy to understand language. For example, it would be unethical to use lots of complicated language when you are advising a client to make a decision. The client could legitimately claim that you used difficult language to disguise essential information, thus preventing them from being able to make an informed decision.
You have a duty to your primary client. For example, if a young person is your client, you might also work with their parents. Both are clients, but in this case, the young person is your primary client.
Practice what you preach, and even more so if you are in a leadership position.
You will sometimes have to compromise between giving the truth and giving reassurance.
Where possible, seek the agreement of the client before providing services.
Meet your duty of care responsibilities. (It is also a legal requirement.)
Accept responsibility for your own actions.
Give a consistent standard of care. If you provide free care to other people outside your work, they are entitled to the same standard of care and confidentiality as if they were paying you for it. (Doing something for free doesn't mean you can gossip or be sloppy.)
About making promises:
Don't make promises you can't keep. Clients will often manipulate you to commit to something by implying that you are doing something wrong if you don't.
Don't make promises on behalf of other people.
Don't promise applicants or clients anything unless you know your organization can deliver within its guidelines and current range of services. In particular, don't promise services that your organization wants to offer but isn't yet up and running, or services that are not currently running well.
Be reflective about yourself. Several questions come up:
Do you know how other people see you? The kind of person you are brings a lot to the way you will act and react in a conflict.
How much are you dealing with a real problem, and how much are you simply ameliorating an angry person? People might justifiably become angrier if you only do some emotional stroking and ignore their real problem. It is better to presume that their dispute may be genuine and their anger is simply an impediment to resolving it.
How much do you need to be cool and objective, and how much do you need to be caring and compassionate? You need to keep in touch with the facts and to be fair. Keep a cool head; if you panic you become part of the problem. Other than that, if you err, try to err on the side of compassion. After all, community services is about helping people. Being professional can be good, but being cold and uncaring can just add to the problem.
Ethics for boundaries
You should also have defined boundaries with your clients.
Perhaps the biggest boundary is what kinds of services you may offer and what you can't.
It is unethical take on tasks outside your expertise. The exceptions are:
when you are closely supervised by someone with the expertize, such as when you are learning.
emergencies when the potential benefits clearly outweigh the potential negative consequences.
It is also unethical to suggest to prospective clients that your organization provides services that it doesn't. (It's also illegal in consumer law.)
If you are dealing with medical issues, especially as an Alcohol and Other Drugs worker, do not try to play a role of medical practitioner:
AOD workers have little or no training in other maladies, such as infectious diseases. Refer these cases to a medical practitioner.
Medical practitioners may have good reasons for prescribing or not prescribing medication that you don't know about. For example, medical practitioners can prescribe higher dosages than the normal maximum for patients with some kinds of physiological states.
About cross-gender relationships …
Displays of affection or physical contact between staff are usually inappropriate.
Romantic entanglements between staff members need to be kept off-site and should not interfere with workplace relations.
Staff must be seen to avoid flirting or being romantically involved with clients. The staff member is normally deemed to be in a position of power over the client, and the relationship would normally be interpreted to be exploitative.
Male and female staff should not be alone together in an enclosed workspace for extended periods.
Define the limits of personal information about yourself that you can appropriately disclose to clients:
Confidential information about your personal life is usually inappropriate. In some kinds of recovery groups, however, your personal story may be very appropriate as long as it serves the purpose of the group. For example, you might tell your story of addiction recovery to an addiction recovery group. But you would not disclose sexual liaisons that are irrelevant to your purpose.
It is inappropriate to give information that sets a bad example or undermines the recovery program.
In particular, you will need boundaries for working with children:
Respect the authority of parents. Children in your care are not your kids.
Never be alone with a child in a private space where no-one can see you.
Have boundaries for physical contact:
Some organizations allow staff to touch a hand to hold a pencil or to tap on the shoulder.
Some organizations do not allow staff to touch children at all.
Some organizations allow hugging.
Some organizations allow only side-hugging.
Ethics for clients' rights
Your organization's statement of practice will probably list clients' rights and responsibilities, and as well as your organization's rights and responsibilities. here should be have policies and procedures for ensuring client autonomy (their right to make decisions) and their privacy and confidentiality. These may include procedures for collecting and analyzing information about clients. Usually this kind of information can only be made public in statistics where readers cannot identity individuals. That is, specific information about individuals is still kept private.
Clients have a right to your care. A mark of you professionalism is your ability to treat them equitably, giving help where it is most needed. It is easy to give too much attention to clients whom you like, such as the friendly, talkative ones, or the naturally attractive ones, or those who have personal values, beliefs, attitudes and culture like yours. It is similarly easy to give inadequate attention to those who are quiet, shy, rude, unattractive, or different from you.
Clients may have rights other than those written in policy that apply to all clients. This particularly applies to particular rights relating to specific individuals and cases. Helping clients to identify their own needs and rights often takes some dialogue. If they are angry, they may be very biased and unreasonable. On the other hand, if they are very uninformed, it might take some effort to convince them that they are entitled to something better. In any case, they should be able to determine whether they are getting their rights and having their needs met.
Actively uphold your clients' rights even when you come up against obstacles. You need to recognize when client rights and interests are not being protected and respond appropriately. Your options are:
Help the client to identify and express their concerns
Refer them to advocacy services if appropriate
Follow procedure when managing a complaint
Report signs of financial, physical, emotional, sexual abuse
Actively uphold your clients' rights. This particularly applies in advocacy roles where you are helping clients to get their rights and frequently come up against obstacles.
Clients have a right to be treated in a non-discriminatory manner.
It is your job to recognize and respond to cultural and linguistic diversity and ensure services are available to all clients equitably, regardless of personal values, beliefs, attitudes and culture. Show that you are aware of your own personal values and attitudes and take into them account to ensure non-judgmental practice.
Show that you are aware of your own personal values and attitudes and take into them account to ensure non-judgmental practice.
You will sometimes need to resolve problems that come from competing value systems.
Recommendations and referals
You are often in the position of recommending courses of action to clients. The choice is ultimately theirs, and you need to respect it even if it would not be your choice. Your role is to make sure that the choice is well informed.
You should give equal weight to equally good options, although you should conceal options that are unethical.
If you give a recommendation, separate your recommendation from the information.
In some cases, the legal onus might be on you to ensure that clients understand their options, for example if you are dealing with the elderly, the young, or the mentally impaired. It is good practice to have a responsible family member present as well.
Referrals
You may need ethical guidelines for giving referrals. They will normally be either in your procedures, in your training, or in your professional standards.
You must refer the client elsewhere if you know you don’t have the expertise yourself. And you need to be reasonably sure that the service to which you refer clients is competent.
You normally need to inform the client what you are doing and why, how much it might cost them, and give them a chance to ask questions. You’ll need the client’s permission to release any information. You might also need a way of following it up, for example getting back to them and asking how it went.
And if you "hand over" the client, you need to know whether you still have any obligations to the client. If both you and the other service both have ongoing obligations, you need to know what the boundaries are and what liaison you need.
Temperament
As you approach ethical issues, you might find that you bring a particular temperament to the task. You unconsciously lean toward some temperament types and away from others.
Black-and-white thinker. "Everything is clear-cut." It’s the principles that matter to this kind of person, so they can be either idealists or legalists.
Pragmatist. What will work?
Empathetic. How will people feel? What can we do to care for them?
Laissez faire. Don’t get too bothered; let it work itself out.
Self-preservationist. What will keep me out of trouble?
You can also see temperaments in terms of conservative and progressive predispositions. In other words, some people naturally resist new ideas and others naturally welcome them.
These seem to be similar to leadership styles, and would be worth further exploration.
Conflict of interest
Identify potential conflicts of interest and resolve them. For example, you could have a conflict of interest if you are working with family members, being paid for advice, or are a member of another organization with incompatible purposes. (Conflicts of interest aren't only about money.)
If you are on a board or committee, declare any actual or potential conflict of interest before the meeting discusses the matter. Check that it is recorded in the minutes. (At least at Board level, it is good practice to also maintain a register of interests and a procedure for reporting them.) You should normally leave that part of the meeting unless a motion is passed to remain, and you should abstain from voting on the matter. Some organizations have rules that even forbid you accepting papers on matters with a conflict of interest.
A conflict of pecuniary interest means that you or a close associate (such as a family member) either stand to make money out of the matter, or that you could prevent losing money that you would otherwise have lost.
A conflict of duty (sometimes called an institutional conflict of interest) means that you hold a position somewhere else that compromises your Board or committee member role on an item of business.
Boards and committees can adopt general guidelines for actual or potential conflicts of interest, for example:
A member of the Board/committee must notify the chairperson of any conflict or potential conflict as soon as it occurs.
Those who cannot or will not remove the conflict of interest must remove themselves from the decision-making process, including any discussion of the issue at hand.
Ethical vs legal
Community services staff work within a legal and ethical framework. Legal and ethical are different. "Legal" means complying with legislation and court rulings, and "ethical" means complying with conscience or the laws of natural justice.
Of course, legislators try to make laws that are ethical. For example stealing, fraud, assault and killing are illegal as well as unethical.
Ethics are often written up as codes of practice by organizations and professional associations. Organizations require their employees to comply, and professional associations require their members to comply. These codes are usually very helpful and often exceed the legal minimums. However, some codes allow actions that other people might consider unethical.
But being legal and being ethical aren’t always the same. Perhaps the best way to see the difference is to look at some examples …
Copyright vs. plagiarism
If you own copyright on something (like a book), copyright law forbids others to copy the exact wording of the original for large blocks of text. So if you copy out a chapter of somebody’s book without permission and try to sell it, you are breaking copyright laws.
Plagiarism means stealing ideas. Let’s say you didn’t copy the exact wording. But you took the ideas, expressed them in your own words, and said you wrote it. It’s not illegal because you didn’t use the exact wording, but it is unethical because they’re not your thoughts. Every reputable university in the world has rules against plagiarism.
Privacy vs. confidentiality
Australian privacy laws forbid organizations to release personal information to people who are not authorized to have it. But organizations can generally make the information available to staff within their organization.
Confidentiality rules are often much more stringent. They also restrict the way information is made available to staff within the organization.
Double payment
Getting paid in full twice for the same work is usually unethical, but seldom illegal. For example:
A university recruiter levies the fee on both the university and the recruited student.
A designer charges a client full fees for designing an item, but keeps copyright on the design as a condition of the contract. He then sells the same design to other clients at full fee.
A college provides unpaid practicum students to employers to do profit-making work, then levies the fee on both the employers and the students.
This can be tricky. It would be more ethical as follows:
A university recruiter levies half the fee on the university and half on the recruited student, and informs each side about the other.
A computer programmer writes software and retains copyright. He sells licensed copies to clients at a fair market rate. He doesn’t charge each software buyer the full fee for the development of the software.
Unethical but legal relationships
Some relationships are often considered unethical:
a man and a woman being alone in an enclosed workspace for extended periods.
an older man taking great personal interest in an underage girl.
Ethical but illegal
It can go the other way too. Something can be ethical but still illegal. For example:
A company’s marketing division is be very effective, but its operations division is struggling badly. Both divisions are totally ethical, but the total effect is illegal. The company is taking orders for goods that it can't provide.
Some countries have unethical trade practice laws and laws supporting racial discrimination. Conflict of interest, insider share trading, and people-smuggling are legal in many countries.
Ethical vs moral
Professional ethics can be monitored through an organizational or professional code of ethics. Morality relates more to personal standards. Of course, something that is unethical can also be immoral. Common examples of ethical and moral principles:
It is normally unethical to demonstrate cross-gender affection in the workplace, even if it is not immoral in any way.
If you are married, it is immoral to develop an cross-gender emotional allegiance that is closer than your relationship with your spouse.
In counseling, morality and ethics are closely intertwined. In a counseling relationship, the counselee in deemed to be vulnerable to exploitation. For example, those who counsel individuals of the opposite gender are at risk or inappropriate relationships. The risk is higher if:
Meetings are more frequent, longer, or over a longer period,
The counselee appears attractive,
Supervision of the counselor is voluntary and not very intensive,
Meetings are held outside professional premises.
For obvious reasons, counseling associations normally have long, detailed ethical statements. In cases of doubt, it is better to either refer the client or perhaps for the counselor to have more intensive supervision.
Approaches to ethics
It's easy (and wrong) to think that ethics is only a philosophical system for splitting hairs and arguing about things that don't matter, or just a set of rules about what you can and can't do. So this page gives a summary of several different approaches to ethics.
Standards
Most professional associations and academic institutions have sets of written ethical standards with which their members, staff and students must comply. They usually contain basic principles and standards for implementing the principles, and solutions to particular ethical dilemmas that normally arise. In many cases, these are compromises between competing interests.
Whatever you think, you normally have no choice but to abide by your institution’s ethical standards.
Virtuous person
The virtuous person approach to ethics asks: "What sort of person am I seeking to become?" It raises issues such as "What are my ideals?" "What am I learning?" "What does my conscience say? What can’t I compromise?"
This approach has a strong biblical basis, and allows it to include a wide variety of topics.
Rights
Individuals are seen to have "rights." It’s not always clear where these rights come from, and the approach is based on the rather dubious philosophy of Deism. However, it often works well as a way of simplifying definitions of what should happen.
Pragmatism
Another way to look at ethics is based on "What will work?" "What’s a reasonable, workable compromise in a real situation?" It’s good to work with reality, and in this way it’s unavoidable.
But pragmatism is not a good solution by itself. Alone, it is quite amoral and nihilistic. It doesn’t actually suggest a compass for morality. In fact, one could argue that if one can compromise, what principles are being compromised?
And if you ask "What will work?", then you need to say what you mean by "work." It usually means meeting some kind of undefined objective.
A variation of pragmatism is "might equals right." This most nihilistic view of ethics is the idea that if you can do it, then it must be right. It was used to justify the worst of Nazism and communism, and is still often used to justify questionable reproductive medical research ("We now have the technology so we should be allowed to experiment with it.") It might have a little more relevance in capitalism: "We can afford a bigger, better hospital, so why not?" "We have the bargaining power to get a better deal." But even then, capitalism can be used as a rationale to exploit the vulnerable and circumvent social justice.
Sociological ethics
The sociological basics of ethics says that the dominant view of a community should be the ethical norm. It is highly relativistic and can be viewed as "democratic," although it does little more than reflect the cultural norms of the group at the time.
From a theological viewpoint, however, it defies any biblical basis for ethics; in fact, one could argue the biblical case that the majority is usually wrong. Ask any Old Testament prophet.
Teleological ethics
An ethical act should be assessed according to its purposes. What good is one aiming to achieve? "Telos" is the Greek word for target.
As a view, this is clearly a useful approach in that it implies both standards and some kind of methodology. By introducing the facet of logical connection, it also opens up the matters of exploring consequences and implications, including unintended consequences.
A weaknesses of the teleological approach is that logical connection does not easily include concomitance. This is the idea that some things can normally co-occur even though it is difficult to assign a cause-effect relationship between them. Another weakness of this view is that it could imply that the ends justify the means. However, most responsible ethicists argue that both ends and means must be ethical.
Absolutism
Absolutism is the idea that a legalistic set of principles is always right and cannot be negotiated or compromised. All core answers are already known and proven to be logically consistent. It is usually the antithesis of relativism.
An absolutist approach isn’t so effective well in practice for issues that are predominantly cultural or political.
(Note: Conservative Christians hold that some truths are absolute in that they can be definitely known and are always true. However, they also accept that different cultures and ages can legitimately express them very differently, and this does not mean that those truths are unknown.)
Solving dilemmas
Aspects of what you do can become very complicated. You should recognize potential ethical issues and dilemmas in your work and discuss them with an appropriate person (usually your supervisor). You may need to consult various people involved to get your job done properly.
There are lots of questions. Some of these, but not all, have right and wrong answers.
Supporting colleagues
You see a colleague not doing very well dealing with a difficult client. You know the client very well and are sure that you could intervene more effectively. But that would undermine your colleague in front of the client.
Your subordinate makes a decision and the client disagrees strongly with it. The client is actually correct; it is a poor decision. The client then comes to you and complains. If you make a better decision, you undermine the authority of the worker in front of the client. Besides, if you take the decision away from the worker, clients will treat his decisions as non-final and want to see you for the "real" decision. What do you do?
Right to personal values
How do you handle problems that come from competing value systems?
The client is involved in a particularly negative practice that you and your organization disagree with. Where do you draw the line between the client’s right to a personal opinion and your organization’s right to expect certain standards of behavior from clients?
Confidentiality
A person tries to bully you into divulging someone’s personal information. The main thrust is, "If you really cared, you’d let me help."
You know enough personal details about a particular client to realize that he could be quite dangerous to other staff. There are two sides to the problem:
Your organization has a policy of need-to-know with confidential information. That is, you can’t inform other staff of clients' personal affairs unless they are directly involved with the client. (The reason for the policy is that you have so many volunteer staff coming and going that the Board decided to put in extra safeguards.)
You have a duty of care to give staff enough information to keep themselves safe.
So how do you tell staff to take suitable precautions without divulging too much information?
Criticism and gossip
In a personal discussion with you, a client criticizes one of your colleagues. The criticisms are very accurate, but if you agree, you would undermine your colleague to a client.
In a personal discussion with you, a client criticizes another client.
Somebody passes on some gossip to you that a client has a serious problem. Who do you talk to?
You are criticized, unfairly you think. How should you respond?
When should you report someone to Department of Child Protection? You need a "reasonable suspicion", but where is the boundary between "verbal report" and gossip? And what if your suspicions are not well-founded, but later turn out to be correct, with serious consequences?
Relationships between parents and children, when the child is the client
The parent is a difficult person with obvious shortcomings. They make bad decisions that obviously have a negative effect on their child, who is our client. But if you encourage better decisions, you would undermine the parent’s authority.
The parent is right and the child (who is the client) is wrong. Should you intervene? If you do, will you take the parent's side? How would you avoid alienating yourself from the child?
Both parent and child are clearly wrong. You feel you can help. Should you intervene?
Conflict of duty
Your organization pressures you to act primarily according to its interests rather than those of the client. In other words, it wants to be the primary client. (This problem is most common in government departments whenever the political concerns of the government of the day might overshadow the interests of clients.)
Reporting unacceptable behavior
When should you report a client to the police for doing something illegal? On one hand, the client has done something clearly illegal. On the other hand, a trip through the justice system might not help the client to recover.
When should you whistle-blow a colleague for unethical conduct? And if you should, how do you do it and to whom?
A lesson from research
This approach comes from the analysis of ethical dilemmas in research methodology. This procedure might look step-by-step, but you need to check through each step afterwards to make sure you have reached a suitable solution. It has the following elements:
State the situation clearly. Try to be objective.
Present the dilemma as a clear contradiction between principles.
Who needs to approve of your solution?
Who can you ask for advice? Your supervisor and colleagues? Other professionals? Your professional association? Others have almost certainly face your problem. There are almost certainly precedents out there and you should compare their solutions.
Identify the principles involved.
Consider the logical connections:
The ethical basis of the principles (pragmatist, absolutist, etc.)
The assumptions
The purpose
The direct and indirect implications and consequences
Any possible unintended consequences
The concomitants
Give your range of possible solutions, and consider the strengths and weakness of each one.
Choose a solution that you can implement.
Check your solution for a failsafe position. That is, what can you do if you have made a mistake?