Question

Should professionals have a caring toward their clients or should they maintain distance?

What recommendations would you have from the Social Work Ethical Dilemmas video?

How can professionals such as psychologists, teachers, or nurses have a caring attitude, but also maintain some detachment in the relationships with their clients?

Answer 1

Professionals such as psychologists, teachers, or nurses are directly in contact with there clients. In order to be effective in executing their work, they need to have a human touch. As a result, they tend to be emotionally attached to their subjects, may it be students or patients. They empathize them. Try to connect to them. However, in order to ensure delivering the necessary services with best quality, they have to be detached from the emotional bindings. This means, their performance should not be affected by relationships, emotions or feelings. Usually, such professionals are taught to be detached in the relationships with their clients during their subject qualification courses. However, following are certain ways which can help these professionals maintain the necessary distance from their clients:

• Focus on delivering the necessary service
• Having a positive attitude
• There is no scope for biases in professionalism
• Do not give any client more-than-required attention and time.
• Be clear in the objectives
• Communicate freely and clearly
• Stay in control and respect self and self time.
• There is no room for any kind of guilt in case of setting boundaries.