Legal Implications of Human Services
Read the following prompt and respond with a post of 250 words.
Read Chapters:
• 13: Ethical Challenges Working with Groups, Couples and Families
In chapter 13, the authors discuss the inherent challenges that exist when working with groups, couples, and families. Specifically, the authors discussed confidentiality issues such as “Secrets as Confidential?” (which often comes up in couples or family therapy) and “Limits to Ensuring Confidentiality” (which often is a challenge in group therapy).
• Please chose 1 of these challenges and briefly discuss your understanding of it.
• Then, discuss how you see it having a potential negative impact on the treatment of the couple, family, or group?
• Do you have any ideas for how to make the issue less of a challenge?
Sample Solution
Informed consent is built from the biomedical ethical principle of autonomy, which emphasizes the importance of respect for persons. The purpose is to empower patients to have control in making health-care-related decisions that reflect their true desires, established by a unique set of personal values. However, challenges arise in certain situations where compelling, competing ethical reasons exist to withhold from obtaining fully informed consent. For example, should practitioners have the flexibility to choose not to obtain fully informed consent in scenarios where they determine the risk of serious harm to either their patient or third parties to be so high as to require an exception? One method of resolving biomedical ethics dilemmas is dialectical principlism, an approach that balances conflicting ethics criteria to determine the most ethical course of action.
