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Compassion’s Boundaries
2004 Update: Law, Ethics
and Professional Regulation in Psychotherapy
Earn up to 6 CE/CME Hours
A. Steven Frankel, PhD, JD
 Why is it that caring and responsible mental health
professionals have become increasingly reluctant to observe and intervene to solve problems where those problems are most frequently seen: outside the professionals’ office? Why is it the caring and responsible
mental health professionals have become frightened to touch patients--to extend a hand of support, encouragement--at times when touching seems so right? Since so many acts that bring dark clouds to the lives of
mental health professionals originate in kindness and compassion, we have developed a seminar on law, ethics and regulation of mental health practice that explores the boundaries and limits of compassion. Rather than the
typical “here are the rules and here’s what can happen to you if you don’t follow them” approach, this seminar illuminates through the entertaining and sharing of its instructor, a psychologist with 30 years of clinical
experience who also happens to be a practicing attorney.
Covered topics focus on how legal, ethical and regulatory forces play out in selected areas of professional activity. The seminar will also provide you with forms and policies
for coping with the laws, regulations and ethics codes, including samples of basic forms for record keeping, amendments and releases of information, informed consent and treatment summaries. In addition, the
seminar will orient you to the regulatory activities of licensing boards and will help you recognize the situations that pull on your heartstrings,
but can lead to heartache, like children caught in high conflict divorce and custody circumstances, parents who are victimized by their partners and patients/clients who need more than a managed care contract will authorize.
In sum, you’ll find that its easier than you may have thought to work in safety without having to give up the caring and compassion that brought you to the field.
Workshop Objectives
Attend this powerful workshop and enhance your ability to:
- Recognize why it is important to know ones professional ethical principles and codes.
- Explain how malpractice insurance works.
- Discuss why different states have different laws about reporting threats by patients.
Workshop Agenda
7:45 am Registration and CE/CME Check-in
8:30 am Passion, Compassion, and Professional Regulation
- Regulation via licensing boards
- Consumer protection agencies
- Hot off the presses: a shift in the playing field
- Regulation via healthcare delivery organizations
- Criteria for “quality of care”
- Professionals as “labor”
- Regulation via malpractice litigation
- A “quality control” device
- Better for the regulated community than board actions
- Standards of care: how they are established & how they affect us
- Privacy problems and record-keeping
- The HIPAA hysteria
- Psychotherapy notes
- How Lawyers see HIPAA
- When we forget our own history
- Out of office service delivery
- Physical expressions of caring and compassion
Lunch NOON (on your own)
1:00 pm Selected Dilemmas
- Treating children and adults in high conflict divorce and custody cases
- Protecting the therapeutic relationship
- Staying safe and in control
- Maintaining boundaries
- Termination with desperate but difficult patients/clients
- Financial concerns
- Treatment concerns
- “Informed consent”: can we truly provide/obtain it?
- The problem of innovative ideas
- Psychotherapy online
- Professional use of e-mail and the Internet
- Ethics of online therapy
- Online provider services
- How much training is enough before using new skills?
3:30 pm Views of the Future: Passion and Compassion Revisited
4:00 pm Adjourn
Workshop Information
Check-in begins at 7:45 am and the workshop hours are 8:30 am - 4:00 PM with an hour lunch on your own from 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM and two fifteen minute breaks.
Earn 6 CE/CME Hours
Current Dates and Locations
Please see Calendar Page
Registration Information
$135 Early registration (sent 14 days prior to workshop)
$155 Regular registration (on-site reg. is $175, space available)
Aide positions must be filled by phone, fax or mail. Please call for availability.
To register by phone call 800-258-8411. Or register online on the Calendar Page
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