Values for Your Work as Human Services

¶ … Values for Your Work as Human Services Professional

As human service professional, I interact in various ways. These include caregiver, case manager, teacher, counselor, behavior changer, consultant, mobilizer, advocate, community planner, community change organizer and implementer, administrator, and evaluator (*). In order to most effectively and successfully carry out these responsible and diverse roles, I am recommended to adhere to a set of values and ethics particularly prescribed for human service professionals.

The values not only make me do the work that I love in the most effective way but it also helps me better help people and avoid conflict. I may, for instance, have my own ideas about how to best help people and in my fervor and ardor commit indiscretions. The values advise me to respect confidentiality of client at all times. They also tell me to place client foremost and to treat him or her with respect and dignity.

Social work provides one with countless tricky and complex situations. The values help me to negotiate these situations so that I am able to maneuver them successfully and in this way best help the client when he/she most needs it. There is time, for instance, when my promise of confidence to client needs to be broken (as, for instance, to ensure the safety and protection of another). The Standards tell me when, and when not, to do so.

The Standards also advise me how my relationship should be with client, aware of the fact that boundaries must, and do, exist. They also adjure me to be knowledgeable about the client culture and community as well as about sociopolitical concerns that effect the client. In all of these requirements, as well as in adjunctions to my responsibility to employers and in standards of education and research, the values guide me so that I become more of a professional and productive human service practitioner.

2. discuss a specific ethical dilemma in relation to the Ethical Standards of Human Service Professionals in which you will experience little difficulty due to a concordance between ethical practice and your personal belief system

Abortion poses little problem for me. Although I am not for abortion, I would have little difficulty working in a Planned Parenthood clinic where abortions are performed.

3. address a specific ethical dilemma in relation to the Ethical Standards of Human Service Professionals in which you either anticipate difficulty, or have experienced difficulty, in ethical practice due to a conflict or discordance between ethical practice and your personal values.

I would have difficulty helping or counseling a rapist who rapes women and minors.

4. Briefly discuss each of the Ethical Standards and this general principle:The lie detector.

Standards are broken down into 6 sections: Responsibilities to clients; to community and society; to colleagues; to the profession; to employers; and to the self.

1. Responsibilities to clients - Dignity, respect, upholding of trust, and ensuring confidentiality and security to client are the primary responsibilities. Client information and protection of records should be ensured and safeguard, to be broken only when necessary. Perimeters, too, are to be placed around relationships with dual or multiple relationships between client and social worker discouraged. The client is the crux of attention. he/she has the right to refuse, or break off, services. The Human service professional builds on the client's strengths.

2. Responsibilities to community and society -- Human service professionals are in touch with sociopolitical events and, when necessary and when within their capability, are adjoined to call attention to corruption and to attempt reform. Human service professionals should also constantly seek to improve their knowledge regarding the diverse communities that they work with and should be able to comfortably work within diverse sectors. Tolerance to all ages, ethnicities, both genders, all religions, groups, and socio-economic strata are a must.

3. Responsibilities to colleagues -- human service professionals should abet rather than impede their colleagues, and consult with them when necessary. Whistleblowing should be done when appropriate and within correct means, and all consultations should be confidential.

4. Responsibilities to profession -- Human service professionals should constantly engage themselves in research and in furtherance of their skills in order to improve their professional abilities.