Practicing within the bounds of our professional ethics standards and our periodically changing state & federal laws can be challenging!  This workshop looks at an established approach to ethical decision-making, which is intended to maximally benefit your clients as well as protect you. We will also review some of the recent changes in WA State law that affect masters-level mental health clinicians, and discuss HIPAA’s new “psychotherapy notes” and the implications of their use in WA State.

1) You will be provided with a list of the most common sections of WA State law that affect the routine practice of mental health clinicians, and be given resources to access other sections of law if necessary.

2) Rather than try to memorize all the guidance contained in various professional ethics code, we will examine the specific values and principles that underlie ALL professional ethics codes. Conducting your professional self with these values and principles in mind can serve the clinician as an overall compass in keeping with the spirit of our ethics code.

3) And finally, you will be presented with a basic ethical decision-making model that when used will not only provide you with an accepted method of arriving at an ethical decision in a given situation, but will also serve as evidence (should your judgment be challenged), that you conducted yourself as a professional. You will have an opportunity to practice the use of this model in small group exercises using case examples that have been taken from the real world of clinicians.