Have you ever been tempted to look up the medical records of a family member being treated at your hospital, maybe just to check if their blood results have come back yet?
What do you post on your social media accounts about your workplace, profession or the health system? Would you date a colleague? A former patient? How do you navigate building personal connections in smaller areas, where everyone in town knows who you are and your job?
Professional boundaries – the tensions and interactions between personal and professional relationships and responsibilities – can be difficult to navigate. The question of navigating professional boundaries is something that every nurse, midwife or carer encounters at some point in their career, but failure to look carefully before you cross those boundaries can have serious consequences for your job, life and career.
Never Have I Ever is an interactive workshop focusing on navigating these boundaries. It will cover definitions of professional boundaries, governance and regulation, case studies, video hypotheticals, roleplay scenarios and discussion of strategies for navigating these boundaries.
The scenarios and hypotheticals will focus on issues such as disclosure of personal information in the workplace, relationships with former patients/clients, and inappropriate social media use. The session will include opportunities for discussion on strategies to navigate these and other issues relating to professional boundaries.
Kirrily Buckett is the Workplace Behaviours and Discrimination Officer at the ANMF (Vic Branch), will be facilitating the seminar. Kirrily likes to combine her experience in labour law and labour relations matters advising ANMF staff and members with her experience teaching young adults in higher education.
