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 can also have serious consequences for your job, life and career.
Crossing Boundaries is an interactive workshop focussing on navigating these boundaries. It will cover definitions of professional boundaries, governance and regulation, case studies from the Fair Work Commission, 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, followed by an attendee-led discussion and insights on strategies to navigate professional boundaries.
Kirrily Buckett is the Workplace Behaviours and Discrimination Officer at the ANMF (Vic Branch), and will be facilitating the seminar. Kirrily likes to combine her experience in labour law and labour relations matters to ANMF staff and members with her experience teaching young adults in higher education.
The Crossing Boundaries workshop will be held over two sessions. The first on 7 September 2022 will be face to face at the ANMF (Vic Branch) offices, and the second online via Zoom on 21 September 2022. Both sessions are from 9.30am–12.30pm. Each session counts as three hours of continuing professional development (CPD) for the purposes of Nursing and Midwifery Board of Australia (NMBA) registration.
Case example
- S, a UK doctor, invited A out for coffee.
- They exchanged sorrows. Dr S’ girlfriend had recently died following a brain tumour diagnosis. A told Dr. S she had just gone through a break-up and joined a dating agency.
- Dr S asked A out instead. They married two years later.
- After 13 years, the marriage ended.
- Six months after the divorce, Dr S married B.
- Dr S is a family doctor. A was a patient he was treating for depression. B was a patient he was counselling over relationship issues with her former husband.
- A medical disciplinary panel suspended Dr S from practising for three months for violating provisional boundaries.
