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The Importance Of Confidentiality In Social Work

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Confidentiality is an important matter across various different professional fields, including in medicine, finance, business, law, education, government, counseling and technology. In some cases, people may be fined, sued or even subject to legal punishments such as incarceration if confidentiality is breached. However, the social workers are required to disclose confidential information about their client without his/her consent if the individual threatens to harm himself/herself, or others. Basically, this action limits a client’s right to self-determination against his/her wishes. Yet, the social worker would be ask to breach confidentiality agreements when one is pursuing involuntary psychiatric hospitalization of a troubled client; or social contact with a former client (Company, 2016). Nonetheless, other ethical challenges relates to agency administration, community work, social policy, and research. For instance, administrators’ decisions about the distribution of scarce or limited agency resources, conflicts of interest among staff, and the use of ethically questionable marketing strategies to solicit clients. Still other ethical dilemmas involve relationships among professional colleagues. For examples social worker’s response to a colleague who has behaved unethically or who is impaired or incompetent or what’s Frederic G. Reamer refers to as the ethics of “whistle-blowing” (Company, 2016). Also, there are five additional common conflicts called common
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