The Ethic Challenge in Public Service

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The Ethic Challenge in Public Service by Carol W. Lewis I witness this challenge every day. One of my duties is to balance the checkbooks for the State run group homes. Every day I answer questions about what the monies can and can’t be used for and some days it can challenge my personal ethics. I recently answered a simple question, “We have a client that needs to get his hair cut. Can we use our checking account to pay for it?” The straight cut and dry answer is no, or so says the policy. This funding stream is to be used for groceries, client activities, repairs and supplies for the houses. The clients and/or their families are supposed to be responsible for personal needs. What made this hard is I happened to know this individuals back story. He only receives only $98 per month and their family is unable to financially help him. So what do you do? Duty says follow the policy to the letter but the results based approach says the guy really needs a haircut. How can we get him a haircut? This there any reason we shouldn’t provide him with a haircut? We are here to provide services to help our clients and how can we deny the client a haircut? So what did I do? I pulled and reread the policy and I asked a very specific question. “We have a client, who is in need of a haircut. IF it is in his treatment plan in the form of a rewards based program, can we then use these funds to pay for the haircut?” My boss in a very cautionary tone of voice answer that if and only if it was in the treatment plan that we could use the funding stream. I was able to call the supervisor of the group home and through a series of leading questions get him to add a rewards based component to the client’s treatment plan, so he was able to get his hair cut. The challenge of ethics in the public sector isn’t something that isn’t going away. Its s to be a battle between the

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