Learning Topic 3: Work with the young person as the focus
By the end of this topic you will be able to use your knowledge and skills to:
Apply youth centred practices when working with young people
Respect the rights needs and responsibilities of the young person and worker
Establish professional relationships and boundaries with a young person and recognise and manage power inequities in working with young people
Section 3.2: Respecting the rights needs and responsibilities of the young person and worker
Balancing our responsibility towards a young people with their right to respect and autonomy is a difficult task. A balance between these two sometimes competing interests is not always obvious. This might be best understood as finding a balance between our responsibility to provide a duty of care, and the clients right to a dignity of risk.
Let's have a look at each of these issues in turn, and then see if we can find a balance between the two.
professional/ethical - what the industry generally thinks we should do
organisational - what the service and its funding body says we should do
community - what young people, parents and
other community members think we should do
personal - what our own beliefs and values
suggest we should do
Duty of care is the legal obligation workers have in
thought or regard for those who may be affected by one’s
acts or omissions.
Duty of care is embedded in common law and is referred
to in relation to negligence. duty of care includes
consideration of: common law, contributory negligence,
criminal negligence, the elements of negligence duty,
breach, injury, causation, and the Occupational Health
and Safety Act (2000) or the Workers Compensation Act
(1987). duty of care exists where someone’s actions or inaction
could reasonably be expected to affect other people. Duty
of care can arise in all aspects of life, not just in
community support services.
Accepted standards of planning, behaviour and service delivery are central to the concept of duty of care. One of the key concepts of duty of care is that workers must
act in a way similar to the way in which any other workers would be reasonably
expected to act. What this means is that a worker would be seen as being negligent if
they behaved in a way they are expected not to (or failed to behave in a way that is
expected of them in their role).
Dignity of risk
Associated with duty of care is the concept of dignity of
risk. dignity of risk refers to a person’s right to
experience all that life has to offer, such as learning a
new skill or taking part in an activity, that may entail some element of risk, but has benefits that might
include gaining greater self-esteem and independence.
Most people with a disability wish to lead a life which is
as close as possible to that of people who do not have
a disability and this inevitably involves taking some
risks. Courts and the law of negligence do not therefore,
expect disability workers to shield their clients from all
possible risks. They do, however, expect workers to
take reasonable care (to be sensible and cautious) in
their work.
Assess the foreseeable harm and see how likely it will be to occur and if it
does occur to what extent.
Assess the likely benefits that the person might gain from the activity and the
extent of these benefits.
Look for ways to reduce the risk of harm without losing the benefits of the
activity.
Weigh up the foreseeable harm against the benefit. The importance of duty
of care cannot be overemphasised, however, you, as the worker, must
respect an individual’s independence and dignity. Being able to maintain
duty of care while still respecting a person’s dignity is a difficult but essential
task for any community services and health industry CS&HI worker.
Duty of care versus dignity of risk
Dignity of risk is the concept that recognises risk as a natural part of life that helps us to learn and develop. This almost seems in contradiction to duty of care that refers
to an action or an inaction that could cause foreseeable harm.
In balancing the two, the benefits gained in undertaking an activity need to be
weighed against the foreseeable risks and determining how these risks may be
minimised.
Activity 3.2
To finalise, watch this lighthearted movie that summarises what we have learnt.
Client information
Of course clients also have rights to confidentiality and ethical treatment. Workers need always to remember that the information that we may collect about a young person always remains their property. Our collecting, storage and use of that information is governed both by law and by ethical principles. The legal side of our responsibilities are covered elsewhere in this course. However as a starting guide, you can view information protection principles here as either a Word document or as a PDF file.
