Introduction
Ethics consultation in health care can significantly impact critical outcomes, such as decreasing the length of stay in an intensive care unit and increasing family and healthcare provider satisfaction. Human service professionals seek the knowledge, education, experience, and supervision necessary to ensure effectiveness when working with persons from different cultural backgrounds. Moral, cultural, and legal issues are given in the work of social workers. All those factors should necessarily align with The National Organization for Human Services (NOHS) standards especially considering the respect and inclusivity of the patients. Consultations with colleagues usually help in resolving questions and determine what role the specialist should take to help the patient. Such interprofessional interactions allow for finding creative solutions in case of untypical situations. Managing ethical challenges in social work is rather effective through the comprehensive approach including following NOHS standards, embracing inclusivity in practice, and collaborating with other professionals.
Common Ethical Dilemmas in Social Work
Legal Aspects
It is essential to use ethical decision-making procedures to ensure thoughtful decisions (Reamer, 2022). Despite not being legal documents, moral codes can be used to resolve concerns about the conduct of human care providers.
Cultural Considerations
Human service workers should consider certain norms when making moral and professional decisions since such situations may appear often. These dilemmas may conflict with applicable laws, employment standards, cultural norms, accrediting bodies, and personal convictions.
NOHS Standard
Patient’s Dignity
The central standard of the NOHS in this paper implies the principles of dignity and social equality. Human service workers seek the education, training, experience, and supervision required to ensure their efficacy when operating with culturally diverse people.
Equality in Social Care
Often, it includes age, gender, language, religion, sexual identity, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, or membership in other traditionally oppressed groups. Additionally, they will aim to improve their proficiency in techniques recognized to be most effective for the population, representing the diversity of different aspects.
Consultations and Discussions on Ethics
Informal Professional Discussions
Employees from this sphere who face moral quandaries occasionally have the option of informal consultations with their colleagues. These discussions often occur through phone calls, videoconference calls, or conversations held in a coworker’s or social worker’s office. These unofficial ethics discussions are not recorded in the client’s file or chart. Social workers occasionally have informal conversations with peers in their peer consultation groups, particularly in independent practice.
Roles of Social Workers
Ethics consultants are able to serve several different roles, depending on the employment setting, responsibilities, training, and expertise of the social worker. Staff workers who have formal training may offer ethics consulting at major human service organizations like hospitals. In-house carers may be helpful in various diverse contexts, including the military, child welfare organizations, mental health facilities, and school systems. Social workers must participate in challenging continuing education to ensure the necessary knowledge and skills relevant to ethical consultation.
Practice Implications
Interprofessional Interactions
There are valuable tools to improve practitioners’ ethical judgment, which include casual ethics discussions, formal ethics consultations, ethical guidelines, and ethics rounds. Social workers working in agencies can identify coworkers with a strong interest in ethical standards and arrange a meeting to discuss creating agency-based protocols (Reamer, 2022). Employees in independent practice can take deliberate steps to raise and address complex ethical issues during peer consultation meetings.
Conclusion
Ethics consultation in healthcare can significantly impact critical outcomes, such as decreasing the length of stay in an intensive care unit and increasing family and healthcare provider satisfaction. Certain situations such as an epidemic of coronavirus or a deficit of specialists and medical equipment also require the social worker to make an ethical decision regarding the distribution of supplies.
Reference
Reamer, F. G. (2022). Managing ethics challenges in social work organizations: A comprehensive strategy. Advances in Social Work, 22(1), 14-32. Web.