The Basics

A question just came up -- does the requirement of ethics training apply only to case managers?  

On its face, the standard is clearly directed at case managers.  Many of the elements explicitly refer only to case managers and clinical and professional responsibilities.  However, while the focus of URAC's inquiry regarding this training will be on the Case Managers and their supervisor(s), the safer call would be to provide some ethic training to any non-case managers (as described in CM 6) who support the case management process.  The rationale for this is that URAC says that the scope of the standard is for "all case management personnel, and non-case managers are involved in the CM process and would have to be considered case management personnel.  However, because they have narrower responsibilities than a case manager, some aspects of this standard clearly would not apply.  So, you arguably could provide non-case managers with a narrower ethics training than the CMSA approach, perhaps one that simply dealt with:

• Prohibition of relationships that could compromise professional objectivity
• Disclosure of conflicts of interest 
• Prohibition of discrimination against a consumer or group of consumers

So, while you're probably ok with training just for case managers, a limited training on these limited topics would guard you against odd interpretations the occasional URAC reviewer.