Question

For this assignment, imagine you have been contacted by an agency in your community to provide consultation on how they might improve their services to clients. The agency is concerned that clients with serious counseling issues are "falling between the cracks" when they are referred to others in the community for intensive treatment. Furthermore, the brief aftercare they provide is not accessible enough to sufficiently support clients as they re-integrate into the community.

********DO NOT ANSWER #1, #2, #3, #4**************ANSWER ONLY #5 and #6*****

1) Identify elderly individuals who are socially isolated and depressed.

2) Evaluate how elderly individuals who are socially isolated and depressed have been served in the history of clinical mental health counseling.

3) Describe the agency that is requesting consultation, specifying where their services are located within the continuum of care available in the community. Briefly outline the services they provide, such as outpatient services, inpatient services, partial hospitalization, or aftercare, and describe the other professionals or entities to whom they can refer clients for coordinated care

4) Identify and describe the consultation theory, model, and strategies you would propose use to assist the agency in improving coordinated services for their clients.

*********ONLY ANSWER #5 and #6 BELOW****************************************************

5) Propose a counseling supervision model for the agency that describes roles and strategies for maintaining ethical and consistent client care.

6) Recommend additional steps professionals at the agency could take to advocate at the state or national level to reduce barriers that impede access, equity, and success for their client population.

Answer 1

5) The fundamental values of counselling and psychotherapy include a commitment to:

• Respecting human rights and dignity
• Protecting the safety of clients
• Ensuring the integrity of practitioner-client relationships
• Enhancing the quality of professional knowledge and its application
• Alleviating personal distress and suffering
• Fostering a sense of self that is meaningful to the person(s) concerned
• Increasing personal effectiveness
• Enhancing the quality of relationships between people
• Appreciating the variety of human experience and culture
• Striving for the fair and adequate provision of counselling and psychotherapy services

Values inform principles. They represent an important way of expressing a general ethical commitment that becomes more precisely defined and action-orientated when expressed as a principle.

Personal Moral Qualities

Empathy: the ability to communicate understanding of another person’s experience from that person’s perspective.

Sincerity: a personal commitment to consistency between what is professed and what is done.

Integrity: commitment to being moral in dealings with others, personal straightforwardness, honesty and coherence.

Resilience: the capacity to work with the client’s concerns without being personally diminished.

Respect: showing appropriate esteem to others and their understanding of themselves.

Humility: the ability to assess accurately and acknowledge one’s own strengths and weaknesses.

Competence: the effective deployment of the skills and knowledge needed to do what is required.

Fairness: the consistent application of appropriate criteria to inform decisions and actions.

Wisdom: possession of sound judgement that informs practice.

Courage: the capacity to act in spite of known fears, risks and uncertainty.