Question 1: What are the issues around maintaining professional boundaries and dual relationships for natural health practitioners?
I feel the Professional ethics and boundaries have been compromised in this case though not in a legal sense or by breaking any Regulated Code of Ethics.
For the Practitioner
• Professional Boundaries for all Healthcare Providers should always be consistent, right from the very start of your therapeutic relationship with you client, it is always up to the Practitioner to make it absolutely clear what can and what can’t be offered. These boundaries should be constant over the course of your client’s treatment. This enables the client to stay focused, on track and reap the benefits for which they …show more content…
This inability to disconnect yourself from your professional work and leave your work, at work, can lead to burnout which is always of major concern for Healthcare Practitioners of any modality.
• Clients within a well-structured concept of professional boundaries can look up to their Therapist as a Role Model. If the Healthcare Practitioner demonstrates exceptional expertise in their chosen field this helps the client setup their own boundaries in their own lives either mentally, spiritually or physically. This may not be the case when the Professional boundaries of the Practitioner and clients turn into Dual or Multi relationships in a social environment.
• The Practitioner becoming friends with both her clients, Jim and his partner, may lead to losing them both as clients as it puts her in an awkward situation where she has to charge her friends for professional advice or it comes to the point where Jim and his partner expect not to …show more content…
Appropriate boundary crossings and dual relationships are likely to increase familiarity, understanding, and connection hence, increasing clinical effectiveness (Zur, O.2004).”. Some practitioners take a much more hard line approach “Avoid Dual Relationships at all costs” (AllCEUs Counselling Ed 2013)
Question 2: What are the implications for the use of social media technologies for the contemporary health practitioners
Healthcare Practitioners need to be extremely careful in keeping their private lives private and I personally believe should only have private Facebook pages, especially in an industry when dealing with very vunerable or sick people. Clients when ill may not be thinking rationally and putting themselves out there on the internet is not a good idea as you don’t know who is watching and who might prey on them.
I personally believe it is a very good idea that Practitioners have their own Social Media Policy that covers everything