This ethics training will provide mental health professionals with information and discussion opportunities on several important ethical and legal aspects of professional counseling work. Content is specifically designed for the LPC standard and meets Oregon and Washington state LPC and LMFT licensure requirements for ethics training.
After a brief introduction and pre-training confidence rating, we will start with a social justice-informed discussion of the Applied Participatory Ethics Model. Following, professional counselor competence and boundary considerations in counseling will be discussed. A formal ethical decision making model will be introduced and practiced as a group.
The afternoon will focus on confidentiality considerations for professional counseling, followed by discussions and an exercise on informed consent and documentation. Following, we will explore the legal considerations of malpractice, direct and vicarious liability, and their impact on professional practice.
During this training, participants will:
- Learn, discuss, and apply the social justice-informed Applied Participatory Ethics Model
- Practice ethical decision making utilizing a Formal Ethical Decision Making Model
- Discuss informed consent, and utilize a creative exercise developed for this workshop
- Discuss and develop understanding of legal issues (direct and vicarious liability) and the impact on professional clinical practice
James Gurule, MA, LPC, is a Licensed Professional Counselor with over three and a half decades of clinical experience working in community mental health settings. In addition to his clinical work as a Child and Family Therapist, James also provides clinical supervision with agency staff and is designated as an agency Lead Risk Manager at Lifeworks NW.
James also regularly provides professional trainings in ethics, solution focused clinical supervision and other strength-based supervisory practices through the Center for Community Engagement at Lewis & Clark Graduate School in Portland, Oregon. He has instructed additional courses at Lewis & Clark Graduate School as part of their Professional Mental Health Counseling and School Psychology programs.
