Informed Consent In Social Care

Informed consent is a crucial part of social work care with every single client that you work with. “In the U.S. health care system, individual patients are subject to informed consent. That is, physicians and healthcare staff must inform an individual patient about his or her “diagnosis, prognosis and alternatives for treatment. (McLaughlin & Braun. 1999, p.322) A patient then has the right to provide consent for continuation of the treatment process.” (Kirst-Ashman, 2014) As stated in our textbook, “to be in ethical compliance social workers must expressly state what the services are, why they are being recommended, any risks and benefits related to the service, the time frame that will be covered by the client consent and a client’s right
In social work everything we do goes by a set of rules and code of ethics. We know that there are things within our scope of practice that we are allowed and not allowed to do. By being ethically aware and competent in the understanding of federal, state and local laws you are doing yourself and your clients a favor. There are laws in place to protect us as social workers and most importantly there are many laws in place to protect our clients. When we can protect ourselves and our clients we can better serve them. Social workers may be reluctant to engage with the law and legal systems because of various reasons. Some social workers may feel that they are not knowledgeable enough about the law the way it works, for them, against them or maybe just how the law works in general. Legal jargon and understanding legal documents can be rather difficult if you don’t have some form of training on how to use them. It is also much more common in the United States when legal content is introduced in social work courses and texts for the law to be presented as somewhat oppositional to social work values, focusing much more attention on restricting and limiting social work practice than on the ways the law can be accessed for promoting rights and achieving social justice(Preston-Shoot, 2001). There is generally much more focus on content related to liability, malpractice, and ethical conflicts than on content that views the law as a proactive tool for empowered practice and teaches social workers how to use the law to counteract discrimination and support ethical values (Slater & Finck 2012). Another potential reason due to which social workers are reluctant to engage with the law and legal systems are widely held stereotypes about the challenges of working with lawyers. There are very few studies that exist that investigate collaboration between lawyers and social workers and studies that do exist