Ethics in the Counseling Profession: Personal Case

NB: We do not resell your papers. Upon ordering, we do an original paper exclusively for you.

NB: All your data is kept safe from the public.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Remove obstacles for change
Ethics
Confidentiality
Patient’s well being
Law and Regulations
Conclusion
List of References

Introduction

Counseling is very essential especially for people who have stress or depression in their lives. In counseling, there is helping of persons that are psychologically not healthy to resolve problems or issues that are affecting them. In most cases, this takes place on a short-term basis. Counseling is a very important aspect of society today. This is because people nowadays go through complex issues that are not easy to solve. These issues range from work, education, marriage, relatives name it-they all affect individuals and families and they can stress someone. All these issues need a person who has been professionally trained to handle them (Corey and Callanan, 2007).

Discussion

As a counselor, I have gone through a counseling course and also participated in the experiential component. This course has impacted positively in my life about my profession. This course has provided various important learning experiences in my life. The counseling and interviewing skills and also the experiential component allowed me to evaluate my current skills and also to be in a position to improve and enhance them. There were so many things that I did not know of until when I had the opportunity of going through the courses in counseling skills (Herlihy and Corey, 2006). For instance, I had so many assumptions of which were not correct according to the studies in counseling skills. The experiential component allowed me to practice what I had learned theoretically and therefore the learned work was more vivid and my skills were greatly enhanced through this. It is one thing to learn something theoretically and it is another thing to practice it.

There is no single person without strengths. When I was reviewing each of these skills I realized that I am also endowed with skills. They include the following

Good listening skills– I was able to realize that I am a good listener and this is a strength when it comes to carrying out counseling.
Empathetic– this is one of the strengths when it comes to counseling skills
Genuine– I realized that I am in a position to tell the affected person the truth even if it is not that good to the recipient. I can bring out the truth in a manner that the recipient can handle and understand.

Unconditional positive regard

Concreteness in providing information

Remove obstacles for change

There is so much that I have learnt in the counseling profession and I plan to use these skills that I have learnt in the counseling process. This will enable me to handle all the situations that I meet with confidence and ethically because of the prior knowledge on how to handle them (Koocher and Keith-Spiegel, 1998).

Ethics

Ethics is defined as the norms or standards of behavior that guide moral choices about the conduct of the personnel in any organization and in this case the conduct of the doctors in relation with their patients. The goal of counseling ethics in the mental health nursing is to ensure the safety of the patients with mental illnesses whereby it is guaranteed to avoid suffering the consequences from the unscrupulous medical practices.

In this case I find that health disparities are well acknowledged in Medical ethics deals with study of judgments and moral values as they are related to the medical field. In medical ethics, there are various expectations on medical practitioners, that is, counselors, executive doctors among other people (Pope K and Vasquez M, 1991).

This can be traced back to the various guidelines on the mental health nursing whereby the following are some of the important values in relation to medical ethics.

Dignity- every patient and the doctor has a right to dignity
Justice- this is in relation to the distribution of health resources that are scarce and in relation to who is gets a specific treatment.
Non-malfeasance-involves doing no harm
Autonomy- the right of the patient choosing or refusing a form of treatment
Beneficence- Involves action of a medical practitioner done to the patient’s best interest
Honesty and truthfulness- this is whereby a person has an informed consent

All these are important aspects in the healthcare industry and they actually provide a framework that is useful in understanding the various conflicts in this industry. Looking at the healthcare industry in America, there are various unethical practices in line with the values indicated above.

Confidentiality

Having worked as a mental health counselor I find that one of the areas as to where there has been unethical practices among the counseling professionals in many organizations are that which is in line with confidentiality. Many counselors lack the value of confidentiality any more. Research carried out shows that patients claim that this value has greatly declined among counseling practitioners. It is obvious that when patients are examined by professional counselors they give very confidential information concerning their health (Herlihy and Corey, 2006).

It has been noted that counselors no longer keep the patient’s information confidential. Counselors are sharing such information with family members and also colleagues at work. It has been noted that such confidential information is shared with the patient’s relatives in case the counselors know them. This has caused problems for the patients in relation to how they are viewed in the society. This principle of confidentiality has greatly declined amongst health organizations (Herlihy and Corey, 2006).

Patient’s well being

This should be the primary concern in any healthcare system where the well being of the patient and not the expenses that are involved. Shareholders in healthcare business need to understand that this is not a business like any other.

That is they need not to focus on how much is generated but rather on how well the services are provided. This issue can be better balanced among shareholders by educating them on the imperative issues in healthcare industry which is seeing patients get better and not the amount of profits gained from therein. Before the price of services is decided in healthcare there needs to be consultation among shareholders so that there is approval of policies. The policies enacted have to be sensitive to the patients’ pockets. When policies are well placed it will help hinder exploitation of patients in relation to the amount that they pay (Pope K and Vasquez M, 1991).

Law and Regulations

Regulations in healthcare are essential as they will help to protect the public against unethical practices from medical practitioners. The following regulations need to be put in place; the procedures for ensuring that the health professionals’ conduct doesn’t pose a threat to patients have to be strengthened (Herlihy and Corey, 2006).

They have to focus more on creation of effective operation procedures among medical professionals. There also needs to be ensuring the standards that are required for a beginner in the healthcare industry have to be common all over the health organizations.

There has to be common legal requirements for individuals getting registration to become medical practitioners in any nation. When the regulations are put in place, revalidation of all the professionals is important. The regulatory body has to be in charge of standard setting so that individuals have to maintain these standards in order to remain on the register. Data has to be carried out often on how medical professionals are carrying out their work. That is in relation to the treatments given to patients and the amount of money that they are charging them (Corey and Callanan, 2007).

Counselors need to know that patient privacy is supreme and there should be no medical data or recognizing information is conveyed to a third person with no articulate authorization of the patient in order to guarantee that information is amassed and conveyed safely and carefully, certain hardware and scientific explanations that congregate worldwide principles have been put into practice. Such proceedings or reports are kept and interpret from innermost computer networks gifted with the utmost principles and values of physical and computerized information safekeeping (Pope K and Vasquez M, 1991).

Medical data of patients should not be delivered by electronic mail or kept on secondary computers that can be accessed by anyone. The patient has power to right of entry to data to view this medical documentation. Professional counselors should therefore comply with the requirements of other appropriate global privacy regulations. The huge majority of our moral preferences should be presented in a simpler manner by adhering to the regulation presented by universal moral principles e.g. individual and proficient standards, guidelines, or set of laws. Always with such alternatives the patients will have little worries and slight perplexity (Corey and Callanan, 2007).

Conclusion

Having gone through the counseling profession and also participated in the experiential component, I have learnt various skills that are essential in counseling that are stated above. I can therefore conclude that through these nursing patterns, this profession has a number of specialties through which one may decide to work as psychiatric counselor, who practices the caring of the people with mental health problems, pediatric counselor where one specializes in the caring of children and geriatric where the older adults are taken care of among other specialties. Thus counseling calls for quality, challenging and informative practices suitable for helping patients to recover. Counselors have a duty of ensuring that they don’t make error which can cause patients to be injured or lose there lives (Herlihy and Corey, 2006).

Counseling programs designed should be well formulated to address all the problems that the patients with such disorders are facing in the society in order to avoid the repeat of the attacks. These counseling services should be made easier in terms of getting access to it for example building counseling centers in all parts of the county. The relevant authorities should also chip in and offer the counseling services for free or at affordable rates to the members of the society.

List of References

Corey, G. and Callanan P. (2007) Issues and ethics in the helping Professions 7^th edition Belmont, CA: Thompson/Brooks Cole.

Herlihy B and Corey, G. (2006) Boundary Issues in Counseling: Multiple roles and responsibilities: second edition. Alexandria, VA: American Counseling Association.

Koocher G and Keith-Spiegel P (1998) Ethics in Psychology: Professional Standards and Cases 2nd Edition New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Pope KS, Vasquez MJT (1991) Ethics in Psychotherapy and Counseling: A Practical Guide for Psychologists San Francisco, Calif: Jossey-Bass.

Click Here To Order Now!