This course provides a broad understanding of ethics, legal standards, and professional responsibilities in behavioral health with an emphasis on counseling ethics. Students explore behavioral health professionals' responsibilities to themselves, clients, colleagues, and society. Facilitates an understanding of ethical standards and ethical decision-making, professional boundaries, confidentiality, and federal and state laws pertaining to specific populations and situations in the behavioral health field. This class may include students from multiple sections.
Must be seeking a Bachelor of Applied Science in Behavioral Healthcare degree to enroll. If interested, visit pencol.edu/bas
Course Outcomes
- Synthesize common themes in professional associations' ethical standards or codes of conduct.
- Define person-first and client-centered care and generate examples.
- Articulate how to support the rights of clients, including their rights to confidentiality, informed consent, self-determination, and least-restrictive treatment options.
- Determine when and how to report suspicions of abuse, exploitation, neglect, danger to self, and danger to others.
- Explain examples of racism, sexism, and other types of discrimination and societal structures or systems which facilitate inequality.
- Formulate strategies to avoid the disclosure of personal information which has the potential to interfere with clients' work toward recovery.
- Describe how to advocate to the state legislature and executive branch for the policy change.
- Distinguish the scope of professional practice in a variety of roles in care provision.
- Describe current standards of the "Duty to Warn" and mandated reporting.