Virtual Counselling

Virtual counselling includes the practice of health care delivery, consultation, treatment, transfer of personal and medical data, education, and communications using interactive video and/or audio devices. As this involves you, your data, your personal information, and your treatment, it is important for you to know your rights, risks, and benefits.

Since virtual counselling involves the use of electronic communications to enable counsellors and clients to engage in talk therapy sessions remotely, it also raises numerous ethical, practical, therapeutic, and legal issues—only some of which will be addressed here due to their length, debatability, and complexity.

 

Virtual counselling services can improve access to remote clients as well as serve to facilitate meetings when it is impractical or difficult to visit face-to-face in an office. Research has found virtual counselling to be effective across a number of studies, although there is not an exhaustive research of every modality, theory, or technique. Virtual counselling may impact therapy negatively with a loss of in-person connection, subtle cues in facial expression, and body language which are a normal part of face-to-face sessions.

 

Due to the reliance upon technology, virtual counselling assumes some practical issues can arise that may negatively impact service delivery. Loss of connection, power outages, and other disruptions to the communications network may result in sessions being interrupted or even cancelled. Reasonable attempts to reconnect and make up for connection issues will be made. However, the counsellor cannot be held responsible for failures in a client’s device and/or Internet service.

 

Counsellors agree to insure that their location is private and secure, such as by delivering services from a private room, keeping records secure behind passwords on private computers and using HIPAA compliant (or similar) services. However, it is up to clients to secure their own location and devices to maintain their own privacy. The counsellor cannot be held responsible for security and/or privacy breaches on the client end. It is advised by the BCACC that we use services which provide end-to-end encryption when providing services. As such, counsellors will offer services on platforms that state their services are encrypted and private. However, it cannot be guaranteed by the counsellor that such services are truly protected and ultimately private due to the scope of technical knowledge required to confirm such privacy.

Your rights are important and it is my obligation (and pleasure) to remind you of them.

  1. You have the right to withhold or withdraw consent to virtual counselling at any time without affecting your right to future care or treatment

  2. You have the right to privacy and confidentiality of personal and medical information. Personal information collected via virtual counselling is managed under PIPA which governs how Canadian professionals, businesses, and organizations can collect, store, and release my personal information (such as name, phone number, address, etc). Personal information is collected only for purpose of contact, personal identification, and billing. Confidentiality of this information is only broken in circumstances relating to the necessity of reporting child abuse, imminent danger to an identifiable third party or self, when there is a court order to release the information, or a client requests the information to be released.

  3. You have a right to know what personal and medical information is being collected and can request it to be made available to you in a reasonable amount of time under PIPA.

  4. You have the right to participate in virtual counselling knowing and accepting that some risk is involved (ie things which may interrupt service such as technical difficulties, third parties illegally interrupting or accessing information during transmission, etc).

  5. You have a right to know that although you may benefit from virtual counselling, it cannot be guaranteed or assured.

  6. You have a right to be cared for medically in an emergency and know that you counsellor may not be able to provide such help remotely. Thus, you must be informed that you can reach emergency mental health or medical services at your local emergency room or hospital if you are having an emergency and your counsellor cannot aid you.