Explain current ethical guidelines for counsellors and supervisor practitioners.

The first 200 words of this essay...

Developing Counselling Skills

Explain current ethical guidelines for counsellors and supervisor practitioners.

Everyone who works within the health and social care sector has to abide by the ethical guidelines. "Ethics can be defined as a set of moral principles or rules of conduct." (O'Farrell, 1999)

The ethics framework states the guidelines that are expected of each counsellor and professional and it consists of three elements; Values, principles and also personal moral qualities. "Professional ethics may be viewed as the rightful domain of moral philosophy which is concerned with establishing principles for articulating what is 'good' and what is 'bad'." (Nelson-Jones, 2002)

Six major ethical principles of the BACP are; self-respect, individual autonomy, beneficence (benefiting the client), non-maleficence (not harming the client), justice (fair distribution of services within the society) and fidelity (honouring promises and underpinning trust). These can be viewed for underpinning the practice of counsellors and superior practitioners.

"Ethical principles are well suited to examining the justification for particular decisions and actions. However, reliance on principles alone may detract from the importance of the practitioner's personal qualities and their ethical significance in the counselling or therapeutic relationship" (BACP, 2007)

Values inform principles