Emergency Instructions for Covering Your Practice

Presenter: Melinda Salzman

Category 1 | 6 CEUs (qualifies for Ethics CEUs)

The class will meet for two sessions, each running three hours.  To earn CEU's you must attend both sessions (Friday, September 22, 2017 & Friday, October 06, 2017)

Target Audience: Primarily for clinicians in private practice; could be helpful to clinicians at an agency.

Description: If you suddenly were to become incapacitated, due to injury, illness or death, who would contact your clients?  What arrangements would need to be made for your clients and your place of work?

Just as it is important for an individual to write a will to protect personal assets and provide for dependents, it is also prudent for a clinician to prepare for an untimely or unanticipated inability to carry out their functions at work.

The purpose of this course is to help clinicians anticipate the needs of their clients and their place of work, should such an emergency arise. Participants will identify and recruit individuals who agree to step in if needed. Between the two meetings, you will begin writing instructions for your "professional executors," covering topics such as how to contact current your clients, gain access to your treatment records, and take care of billing and banking.

Objectives:

1. Identify and describe legal and ethical issues pertaining to an unplanned interruption in the clinician’s practice.
2. Address ethical principles regarding confidentiality in informing patients of the interruption. 
3. Apply ethical principles in selecting individuals to carry out necessary clinical and business tasks. 
4. Apply records retention requirements as mandated by the therapist’s jurisdiction. 
5. Recruit suitable individuals to carry out necessary clinical and business tasks in a professional manner.
6. Draft instructions which spell out procedures these individuals are to follow and provide detailed descriptions of how to find needed information.