Providing Ethical Referrals

Develop a training that gives coaches the knowledge awareness of when to refer a client out, and how to talk to a client about the decision to refer out, and how to provide a proper mental health referral.

Challenge: Coaches cannot “diagnose” or analyze clients, so the conversation must be had without clients implying that they are evaluating the client based on diagnostic criteria.

I conducted a needs assessment via surveys about what coaches most wanted to learn from the process of ethical referrals.

Most coaches reported that they had awareness of resources for where they could refer a client, but the most difficult aspect of referrals was how to talk to clients about termination of coaching and referral to an appropriate mental health professional.

Challenge: Given that I was working with remotely distributed coaches from all around the world, and that their clients might also be remotely distributed around the world, there was also the issue of how to amalgamate the different resource options appropriately.

Practices:

• I decided on a constructivist approach for discussion of ethical referrals that invited questions and contemplation of what it might be like for a client in need of a referral, rather than a lecture-based approach with a list of “this is what you (as coach) should do (with the client).”

• I decided that a community based-approach for pulling together resources would be best, and created an activity where everyone would share a resource local to their area in a public forum (eg, a therapist, a local organization, etc). Then these resources were compiled into one document that the entire group could use for reference.

The training was delivered to 53 coaches in training. Pre-training activities included a group thread in a forum where everyone shared names and contact information for resources in their area such as organizations or therapists. This information was compiled into a document that could be shared with everyone, so that if someone had a client in that particular area they had a resource to turn to.

Additionally, on-call activities focused on the development of a “script” that coaches could use when discussing the need for a referral with a client. In a skills-development session, coaches did mock referrals with role-playing clients, to practice what it’s like to discuss a referral, with feedback given.

Coaches were also walked through a somatic breathing exercise that could be used as a temporary measure to help a client that was actively in crisis on a call, while resources were being called in.

Participant feedback was positive; most focus went to appreciation of a resource list that participants could take with them even after the training was over, and a decreased nervousness around delivering the news that a referral was necessary to clients based on the opportunity to practice and get feedback.