Ethics are moral priciples that govern a person's behaviour or the conducting of an activity.
In the practice of therapeutic hypnosis, there are many important ethical issues to consider in relation to patient safety and quality of care. Different therapeutic approaches will entail different ethical beliefs, but all behaviour on the part of hypnotherapists is obviously bound by national law and professional guidelines.
Increasing administrative duties and legal pressures on therapists unfortunately encourage many to focus primarily on record-keeping and avoiding litigation rather than actual quality of care. Not only must therapists meet minimum legal requirements, they must also focus on how patients can be best served. I will look at some of the key issues that it
…show more content…
Hypnotherapists are encouraged to join a relevant national body, and act in accordance with the code of conduct issued by that particular body as well as national laws. Many countries do not have recognized national bodies, even highly developed nations such as
Singapore (Chia 2013). In the UK, the General Hypnotherapy Register (GHR) has a Code of Ethics. The British Association for Counselling and Therapy have an Ethical Framework.
Both of these sets of guidelines will be invaluable when deciding upon the best course of action when confronted with an ethical dilemma and can be used in conjunction with relevant national laws.
Because many countries lack official bodies relating to the conduct of hypnotherapists, standardisation across the profession of hypnotherapy may need to increase in the near future. This issue is especially important given that hypnotherapy treatments are becoming more and more common, for example, via the NHS (Beaven-Marks 2013). A set of universal guidelines that can be adopted by hypnotherapists worldwide would go a considerable way to improving patient safety and quality of care, and the public perception of hypnotherapy in