Tag Archives: duty to protect

A Brief Review of Some Duties and Requirements

What are the various duties or obligations of a licensed mental health practitioner? Are there both legal duties and ethical duties, [...]

Are There Limits to a Nurse’s Duty to Advocate for Patients?

In the following case1, an LPN and a charge nurse’s attempted management of a patient centered on their respective duty to protect the [...]

Law and Ethics: Questions to Ponder

There comes a time when the practitioner believes that the patient presents a serious and imminent danger of violence against the [...]

Dangerous Patients and the “Tarasoff Duty”

… Wow - what a problem exists in California! Therapists are in somewhat of a precarious situation for a number of reasons related to a) [...]

Dangerous Patients and the Therapist’s Duty

… In a previous issue of the Avoiding Liability Bulletin, under the heading of Dangerous Patients and the “Tarasoff Duty”(April 2005, [...]

Immunity From Liability

… In the April 2005 (Volume 2) issue of the Avoiding Liability Bulletin I wrote about a huge problem in the state of California with [...]

Suicide / Self Harm – The Practitioner’s Role

… Occasionally I am asked to opine on the subject of a mental health practitioner’s participation in what can be called “supportive [...]

“Duty To Warn”

… Only (my tongue is firmly implanted in cheek) thirty-six years after the landmark Tarasoff vs. Regents of the University of [...]

The Dangerous Patient – Again!

… Two separate events spurred me to once again write about this topic. First, the Governor of California signed a bill into law in July [...]

Preventing Gun & Other Violence…The Dangerous Patient

With the President, Vice-President, and Congress focusing on the prevention of gun violence as a result of yet another horrifying [...]

Psychiatrist Shoots Patient

In a recent issue of the Avoiding Liability Bulletin (March 2014), I asked whether it was ever permissible for a mental health [...]

Confidentiality and the Dangerous Patient

Although I have previously written about this topic on several occasions (see Archives), the tragic shootings at Virginia Tech in April [...]