Confidentiality
How do we manage confidentiality at TEEN FLASH?
This is a simple one to answer; as not one professional can assure you of a completely confidential service; not even your doctor, social worker or your teachers. This is because all professionals have what is called a ‘duty of care’ which is a legal term.
Typically, areas of concern include health and safety, food safety, personal safety, child, and adult protection (plus wider safeguarding implications). All children and adults have a right to protection and freedom from abuse or exploitation, regardless of age, disability, gender, racial heritage or racial culture, religious belief, sexual orientation, economic status or otherwise.
What is a ‘duty of care’?
A ‘duty of care’ means that we have a moral and legal obligation to ensure that everyone associated with our company (The Ministry of Parenting) is fully protected from any personal physical and or emotional harm when engaged with our service.
This means if someone shared something that gave us real concern about their welfare, we may have to share that concern with another professional or someone at home. TEEN FLASH is a bit unique as we already know that those attending our programme are using self-harm to manage their emotions or life circumstances. It would be unusual for us to need to share anything that is said to us about someone’s self-harming behaviours.
In general, within TEEN FLASH we don’t talk about individual acts of self-harm – often people attending want these acts to remain private and so they stay private.
What would we have to share?
We would have to share with someone else if someone attend-ing the group said they wanted to take their own life; or had plans to do so. We have ‘a duty of care’ towards them.
We will also need to share if we believed that someone was at ‘significant harm’ (another term used in law). Harm means ill treatment, sexual abuse and other forms of ill treatment which are not physical, such as emotional abuse. (S31 (9) Children Act 1989) Harm also includes ‘the impairment of health or de-velopment, physical, intellectual, emotional, social and behav-ioural development’. (S17 Children Act 1989)
If someone did share something that worried one of us, we will try to talk to them before we shared our concerns with another person. However, we would not be able to do that if we thought that would put our group member at further harm.
Confidentiality within the group
Everyone is asked to be respectful of each other’s attendance at the group and adhere to the group rules which we all make together. If the word ‘confidentiality’ doesn’t come up in the group rules discussion, we ask for the group to follow a ‘no gossiping’ rule and discuss the merits of this.
Those attending can even use another name at the group if it makes them feel more assured of their privacy.
Confidentiality before we meet
When we receive an application to attend TEEN FLASH we try really hard to ensure that no one from the same school or year group attends the same group.
On our application form, we ask what school young people attend and also ask about their hobbies or clubs that they attend. This is so we can try to identify if two people attending the same school or club have been referred. We then try and arrange for the two people to attend different groups.
Confidentiality is important to us; so is trust. This is where it starts.
