Best Sellers

A303 Ethics with Soul

In our litigious age of risk management, more and more clinical decisions in therapy are based on fear of civil lawsuits and dread of licensing boards rather than on clients' needs. This course is designed to reduce unnecessary anxiety while helping you bring more soulfulness and clinical integrity back into your practice. You will come away from this course more firmly grounded in the principles of ethical practice and decision-making, while neither compromising your best clinical judgments nor increasing your risk. We will cover the standard of care, therapeutic boundaries (i.e., touch, gifts, home visits, bartering, self-disclosure and dual relationships), clinical forms, record keeping, confidentiality, termination, ethical risk management and HIPAA basics. Students will also learn how to deal with the complexities brought about by e-mails, computers, Internet, and online therapy.

Note: This workshop fulfills California and many other state board requirements for training in ethics and risk management. Check the guidelines of your state board for details.

Meet The Instructor

Ofer Zur, Ph.D. is a psychologist in Sonoma, CA. He has been teaching ethics classes for over 15 years. Most recently he published the HIPAA Compliance Kit and co-authored the book, Dual Relationships and Psychotherapy.

Course Contents

Session 1: Ethics, Morality, Critical Thinking • How do we define "the standard of care?" • What are ethics and morality? • What is the process of ethical decision-making?

Session 2: Confidentiality: How to Protect It in Simple and Practical Ways • Record-Keeping: how to keep records and for how long? • Responding to subpoenas and other requests for records • Required basic clinical forms • Review of the most essential clinical forms; how and when to use them • Fees: how to set and collect fees • Scope of practice: how to define and identify each therapist's scope of practice

Session 3: Boundaries: Boundary Crossing vs. Boundary Violations • Issues about touch, gifts, self-disclosure, bartering, home visits, adventure-outdoor therapy • Dual relationship, with emphasis on small towns, or small communities in big towns, such as church, synagogues, minority gay and lesbian, disabled communities

Session 4: Demystifying HIPAA: What It Is and Is Not • Simple ways to become compliant (All therapists should have this information even if they do not use a computer and do not bill electronically.)

Session 5: Telehealth • The use of phone, faxes, e-mails, Instant Messaging, chat/online forums, teleconferencing • Termination: how to go about it; how to document it; clients who end therapy against their therapist's clinical advice; intermittent long-term therapy and termination

Session 6: Ethical Risk Management • Principles of risk management based on clinical and ethical integrity • Ethics with soul: recapping how to practice ethically and soulfully and with integrity

Learning Objectives:

1. Identify guidelines for dealing with issues such as confidentiality, record keeping, informed consent, scope of practice, therapy with minors, storage of records, responding to subpoenas and more.
2. Discuss boundary issues related to gifts, self-disclosure, bartering, home visits, and dual relationships.
3. Explain ethical guidelines for storage of records.
4. Describe the relationship between risk management and clinical integrity.

Search all CE courses

Search all Audio courses