Ethics CE Courses for Social Workers

After the United States Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in the Dobbs decision, many states enacted laws restricting access to abortion. This workshop provides social workers with a framework for managing ethical dilemmas that may arise when laws restricting access to abortion care conflict with their ethical duties to clients (e.g., self-determination, informed consent, privacy, beneficence, and nonmaleficence).

Effective clinical practice with LGBT populations requires a basic understanding of LGBT concepts and terms, presenting problems, and evidence-based interventions. This workshop describes the fundamentals for assessment and therapy with LGBT patients through a discussion of best practices, language use guidelines, and ethical considerations. The workshop explores the concepts of sex, sexuality, and gender and defines common terms used to describe LGBT identities. Health disparities, co-occurring mental health problems, and presenting clinical concerns among LGBT populations are explored through the lens of Minority Stress Theory. Finally, ethical considerations for confidentiality, informed consent, and evidence-based therapy practice are discussed.

When clients lack the legal capacity to provide consent due to their age or mental condition, social workers obtain consent for services from parents, guardians, or others who have the legal authority to provide permission on their behalf. This webinar delves into the concept of “assent,” including why, whether, and how to obtain permission from clients when they lack decision-making capacity.

You practice social work and receive a subpoena to submit your client’s records and testify in upcoming court proceedings. This workshop prepares you for responding to a subpoena, balancing your client's needs, rights, and wishes with your legal and ethical obligations to the court and justice system.

Emotional support animals have been shown to be effective in the management of stress, anxiety, and depression. Service animals have long been shown useful for people with perceptual disabilities, and there is a growing research body on therapy animals. This course addresses the benefits of animals as companions or providing services, definitions of different classes of animals, and the APA ethical standards involved when evaluating the potential use of animals in the care of people.

Social work is often described as a helping profession because the primary mission of social work is to help individuals, families, groups, and communities with a broad range of physical, psychological, social, and spiritual concerns. This session focuses on the ethics of self-care, a responsibility in which social workers attend to their own well-being, which also helps them serve others more effectively.

The “friendly visitor” of social work’s early history introduced a level of professional distance to social worker-client relationships that many practitioners maintain today. This webinar explores why negotiating and creating healthy professional boundaries in our work is essential and what is missed when we stress risk management over compassion in these relationships.

Licensing infractions, professional review complaints, and malpractice lawsuits against social workers are often related to boundary issues, conflicts of interest, and dual relationships. This webinar identifies situations that give rise to these risks and provides practical guidelines for guarding against these risks and maintaining ethical relationships with clients.

Social workers use a broad range of technology in practice, including videoconferencing, electronic records, text-based communication, avatars, biofeedback, and artificial intelligence. This workshop focuses on identifying and managing informed consent, confidentiality, competence, boundaries, access to services, social justice, and other ethical issues that may arise when using various types of technology.

Social work ethics is not just about following the code of ethics or making specific decisions to resolve specific ethical issues, but rather, how to live ethics throughout one’s professional interactions and practice. This webinar demonstrates how social workers can use virtues such as caring, honesty, fidelity, and moral strength to guide their practice and interactions with clients, family members, co-professionals, and community members.