New Risk-Management Tool Available

Social Workers Will Benefit by Ethics Audit

WASHINGTON—As risk-management becomes more of an issue in the delivery of direct services, social workers now have a tool to help identify ethical and risk-management issues in their specific practice setting.

In the book Social Work Ethics Audit, published by the National Association of Social Workers (NASW), author Frederic G. Reamer explains that this practice tool will "enhance the ability of social workers to be able to make sound ethical judgements as well as help reduce the risk of law suits against individuals and agencies."

Reamer adds that the major benefits are to provide social workers with a practical and easy guide to conduct an overall assessment of their ethics-related policies, practices and procedures. It will allow identification of ethical issues pertaining to their specific practice settings and review and assessment of their current practices. It will create a strategic plan to modify current practices as needed as well as monitor the implementation of the quality assurance strategy.

For administrators, the audit provides an organized, systematic way to assess ethical issues prior to agency accreditation, which Reamer says has become an important issue and one that would benefit by an internal audit first. "Completion of the audit demonstrates an administrators’ attempt to review and assess important ethical issues," Reamer insists.

In addition, administrators need to ensure that staff is knowledgeable about ethical standards in order to protect clients and prevent ethics complaints and lawsuits.

Educators will also benefit from this tool by being able to instruct students about these important ethical and risk-management issues in practice and help them make future sound ethical decisions.

This comprehensive ethics audit will assess the extent to which social workers and agencies have practices, procedures, and policies in place to protect clients; identify ethics-related risks; and prevent ethics complaints and ethics-related litigation. It includes a comprehensive introduction and overview of key ethical issues in social work; an easy-to-use instrument social workers can use to conduct an ethics audit as well as a computer disk to facilitate the completion of the audit.

For more information about ethical issues and risk-management as well as the Social Work Ethics Audit, Frederic Reamer can be reached via email at freamer@ric.edu.

To order a Social Work Ethics Audit, please order online or call 800-227-3590.