week 4 discussion

Ethical Consulting and Confidentiality in Program Evaluation at Mental Health America

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Ethical Consulting and Confidentiality in Program Evaluation at Mental Health America

For this class, I will be using the organization Mental Health America for this agency evaluation. Its description indicates that Mental Health America is a nonprofit dedicated to cultivating mental health, preventing the causes of mental illness, and providing for social determinants which affect mental health (Mental Health America, 2023). The MHA works to build positive psychological and social outcomes through its emphasis on advocacy, community education, and supportive services such as mental health screening, peer support programs, support groups, and crisis counseling services. For more than a century, MHA has worked diligently to build a network that supports individuals in all states, focusing on three key areas: stigma reduction, increased access to mental health care, and building communities that support all dimensions of well-being.

Because of this, being a consultant assessing the program's effectiveness at MHA requires client confidentiality as the central rule. Data collected on clients through program evaluations needs to follow strict guidelines about the ethical treatment of that data. For instance, the APA guidelines clearly state that client information is to be treated as confidential (APA, 2017). All data reported from the clients must be de-identified; therefore, no personal details like names, addresses, and contact information should appear or be summarized in a code format that does not allow individual identification. The database for participant data will be kept in an encrypted and password-based database through the use of Research Electronic Data Capture (REDCap). In addition, all hard copies of documents will be stored away in locked drawers in a safe room. A unique identification code will be conferred upon every study subject, while the list containing names that correspond to the codes will be kept in a separate encrypted file that only the primary investigator will have access to. This agrees with the (National Institutes of Health [NIH], 2021), which states that this level of protection will ensure the privacy of those receiving services from MHA while allowing the evaluators to effectively analyze the program outcome.

Other ethical issues include obtaining informed consent, where the purpose of evaluation, collection, and use of the results are clearly communicated to the participants. Here, vulnerable populations among the MHA clients could be given special assurance that no information provided would be disclosed without consent, solely for the effectiveness of the programs (NIH, 2021). It is another line of defense, where no data collection that might fall under the purview of health information is done without having in place the various rules and regulations that are provided under HIPAA.

Specifically, the assessment will aim at an interview with the Senior Program Director of Direct Services in charge of the peer support and crisis counseling services. The interview will be about how such programs are implemented, followed up, and what measures of the quality of programs are ensured. In this also, quarterly program reports and outcomes from the internal program monitoring database of the organization will be analyzed.

The assessment will include the administration of pre and post twelve months quantitative mental health outcome measures using tools such as the PHQ-9 for depression and GAD-7 for anxiety. Administration of these tests will be on the basis of their scoring systems: the PHQ-9 has a scoring range of 0-27 (with absence to the most severe level of depression) and GAD-7 of 0-21 (no level of anxiety to the highest level of anxiety). Paired comparisons of the data will be evaluated using t-tests in order to assess the effectiveness of the program.

In this light, the evaluation of a nonprofit agency like MHA, in general, needs attention to ethical guidelines, confidentiality practices, and informed consent. This will protect rights and allow openness to productive evaluation.

References

American Psychological Association. (2017). Ethical principles of psychologists and code of conduct. APA. Retrieved from https://www.apa.org

Mental Health America. (2023). About us. Retrieved from https://www.mhanational.org

National Institutes of Health. (2021). Informed consent process. NIH. Retrieved from

https://www.nih.gov