TeachME Professional Development

1. The fundamental intent of confidentiality is to protect a client's right to privacy by ensuring that matters disclosed to a professional not be relayed to others without the informed consent of the client, and in discussing confidentiality, therapists also hope to encourage:

2. States vary in the degree to which their laws specify limitations on privileged communication between counseling professionals and minor clients, with some protecting only disclosures about problems related to alcohol and other drugs, and others giving broad protection, specifying a few exceptions such as reporting child abuse and crime or potential criminal activity.

3. While advocacy for minors’ rights in education and mental health has led to greater consideration of the rights of children and adolescents to be involved in making decisions that affect them, long-standing controversies have reemerged about the risks and benefits of young people’s involvement in decision making and their competence to make appropriate decisions.

4. Each of the following is a main function served by the informed consent mechanism EXCEPT:

5. Experts such as Ed Deci and colleagues contend that one way to encourage family cooperation and involvement in the therapeutic process is to use practices that enhance feelings of acceptance, usefulness, and engagement.

6. When making initial therapeutic contacts with family members, factors to consider include using the consent process to assess and enhance motivation, contracting for involvement, handling concerns about privacy and confidentiality, and managing parent reactions to initial contacts and assessment.

7. Strategies for maintaining motivation throughout an intervention include ensuring parents feel a growing sense of relatedness to the intervener, enhancing valuing by providing many desirable ways for parents to participate and by facilitating their decision making, and providing continuing support for:

8. Interveners who want to enlist parent involvement must be clear about the value and forms of such involvement as well as the:

9. One benefit of encouraging adolescents to share personal stories or feelings is that while learning how to honor the privacy of others, young people are also learning how to respect boundaries, which may be weak or unclear at this age.

10. In a helping relationship, a fundamental concern of the professional is to act in the best interest of the client, as defined mutually by the client and the clinician.

11. The most important reason to maintain confidentiality in the delivery of health care is to:

12. One of the most commonly cited obstacles to interagency collaboration is the existence of confidentiality provisions that appear to restrict agencies from working together when treating children and adolescents.

13. In developing a computerized data system and using it effectively, agencies should determine the purpose of the system, obtain the cooperation of all participating agencies, develop thorough security procedures, train staff carefully, and:

14. Which of the following is NOT one of the authors’ recommended goals for sharing information within collaborative school-linked service efforts?

15. In rare instances when a parent or student does not want to give consent, the counselor or service provider should try to determine, without putting pressure on the individual, why the person is refusing to give consent and then seek review of this concern by the involved partners.

16. Generally, schools must have written permission from the parent or eligible student in order to release any information from a student's education record, but FERPA allows schools to disclose those records, without consent, to school officials with legitimate educational interest, other schools to which a student is transferring, and to specified officials for:

17. When students enter into a counseling relationship with their school counselor, the school counselor will educate the student about the specifics of the counseling process including purposes, goals, techniques, and:

18. Although group counseling is an efficient way of to deal with students’ problems and concerns, allowing individuals to develop insights into themselves and others, confidentiality is much more difficult to guarantee than in an individual setting.

19. FERPA prohibits a school official from disclosing information about a student if the information is obtained through the school official's personal knowledge or observation, and not from the student's education records.

20. When treating adolescents, health professionals have an obligation to make reasonable effort to encourage the adolescent to involve parents, whose support can, in many circumstances, increase the potential for dealing with the adolescent's problems on a continuing basis.

21. While confidentiality is an ethical term denoting a counseling practice relevant to privacy, privileged communication is a legal term denoting a requirement to protect the privacy between counselor and student.

22. When working with adolescent girls, the authors recommend considering each of the following EXCEPT:

23. Reviews of privacy protections and confidentiality restrictions in federal and state constitutions, statutes, regulations, and agency practices, as well as those in various professional standards indicate that confidentiality restrictions are significant barriers to interagency collaborations.

24. The most common way of information-sharing among agencies takes place through informal exchanges, usually verbal and by telephone.

25. When interagency professionals have developed a high degree of trust and cooperation, a written release is not required to share or exchange student documents.

26. In using aggregate information systems, particularly automated information systems containing identifiable information, protective mechanisms must be in place to ensure the proper disclosure of confidential information.

27. Ethical responsibilities and legal obligations for protecting student health information ensure that uniform standards for collecting and recording student health information are established and that the disclosure of confidential health information within the school to limited to information necessary to:

28. While it is important that teachers are aware of the rights of individuals to privacy and to respect the confidential nature of information concerning students, they may consult and collaborate with other professionals for purposes of more effectively helping the student.

29. Teachers and other school personnel must be aware of policies for sharing information with legal authorities, as police and probation officers have an inherent right to access all student records.

30. Schools that participate in a federally assisted school nutrition program have personal information about students' eligibility for free and reduced-price school meals, and these programs have regulations that are more restrictive than FERPA's regarding the disclosure and use of this information.

31. Privacy is a uniquely personal right that reflects an individual’s:

32. Although school psychologists are ethically obligated to keep records of their work, they are to document only information that is necessary to provide services.