Besides, the agency director’s intentions seemed to me to be both admirable and noble.
The former clients the director hired were, she said, stable, clean, and sober and were hired to provide peer support services to current clients.
Her goal, she said, was to empower former clients who are functioning well and have much to offer current clients. She recognized that select former clients could provide current clients with unique empathy, depending on their own experiences as clients, and serve as constructive role models. So new hires received training in how to serve as peer support professionals.
Specifically, the board alleged that the social worker the director of a prominent mental health agency failed to comply with prevailing ethical standards when she hired three former clients as agency employees. Recently I testified in a complex licensing board hearing. This is the case. My task was to serve as an expert witness in a case where the state licensing board alleged that a social work administrator violated the board’s ethical standards. Consequently, importantly, I actually cited the following two key standards in the NASW Code of Ethics that, in my view, obligate agency administrators to take these steps. Specifically, To be honest I stated that agencies that consider hiring former clients must develop policies and protocols to avoid inappropriate conflicts of interest and dual relationships and to protect confidential information.
Know what guys, I made it clear that I supported the agency director’s noble goals to empower former clients, when I testified in this case.
I explained that, ideally, agencies that consider hiring former clients would form a task force to identify pertinent ethical problems, draft comprehensive policies to address these problems, and provide indepth training to current staffers and new hires to ensure that they fully grasp the nature of ethical challenges that may emerge when former clients are hired as staff.
I explained that quite a few reputable social service programs nationally have hired former clients successfully, and that amidst the principal hallmarks was agency administrators’ careful attention to possible ethical problems. Usually, the social workers were very upset about the director’s unwillingness to take assertive steps to address their ethics related concerns and sought consultation with the state licensing board’s administrator. While conforming to licensing board documents, the director dismissed the staffers’ concerns, informing them that she had the situation under control, before filing their complaint, the social workers shared their concerns with the agency director.
Besides, the licensing board ultimately concluded that the agency director violated a couple of the state’s ethical standards.
They reluctantly did so.
Basically the administrator ld the staffers that if, in their judgment, the agency director was unwilling to address ethical problems that, So if not resolved, could expose clients and the agency to risk, the social workers had a duty to file a complaint with the board. Furthermore, this could pose an untenable problem with boundaries and conflicts of interest, Second, the social workers who filed the complaint were concerned that the agency had not anticipated that a former client who had become an employee might need to become a client again if significant symptoms reemerged. Generally, a former client who became an employee and needed to obtain services as a client again could not be referred to another mental health agency in the community there was no other agency within a 63mile radius, The agency was located in a very rural section of the state. Receiving this kind of negative feedback from one’s former therapist gonna be devastating emotionally and undermine the benefits gained from their prior therapeutic relationship. There were a few problems.
Now this appeared to be a conflict of interest and an inappropriate dual relationship.
It should be ethically problematic if the new employee’s current supervisor, who had been his therapist when the employee was a client, had to give the employee critical feedback or sanction the employee for poor work performance, as I testified at the hearing.
Problems arose when two other agency staffers who supported the concept of peer support specialists became concerned about what appeared to be ‘ethics related’ challenges. Actually, these social workers were concerned when they discovered that a brand new hire’s former therapist at the agency was supervising the new hire. As a result, in accordance with the staffers who filed the licensing board complaint, the agency did not provide the new employees with sufficient training associated with management of boundaries and confidential information. In one instance, amidst the social workers testified, a former client who became a peer support specialist was concerned when he discovered that someone who was a client when he was a client had returned to the agency in a state of cr.