Question
What is the Number One Ethical Risk Associated with Social Workers and Technology?
Answer
The number one ethical mistake is inadvertent errors. Now, the vast majority of social workers are not going to engage in unethical conduct. I know that, but I have been involved in a number of lawsuits as an expert witness and in licensing board cases where good social workers made mistakes with regard to their use of technology.
They sent an email message that contained confidential information and they did not protect it and it ended up in the wrong hands. They communicate, these are real cases I have testified in by the way. They communicated with clients late at night after 11 o'clock, online using Facebook private messaging, and some of the content simply was not appropriate. There were boundary issues because it was happening late at night.
I was involved in a case where a social worker, a person of faith which is fine, posted on Facebook a message asking the social worker's online prayer group to pray for one of the social worker's clients who was having a tough time. The social worker did not disclose the client's name but included too much information that enabled one of those group numbers to identify that client, which led to a licensing board complaint.
Social workers who exchanged text messages with a clerical person in their agency gossiping about a client that the clerical person happens to know. This is a real case, I just testified in this case, these are mistakes.
This Ask the Expert is an edited excerpt from the webinar, Social Work in the Digital Age: Ethics and Risk Management Challenges, presented by Frederic G. Reamer, PhD.
