TPC-Journal-V5-Issue4

The Professional Counselor /Volume 5, Issue 4 459 Counselors who are members of interdisciplinary teams delivering multifaceted services to clients remain focused on how to best serve clients. They participate in and contribute to decisions that affect the well-being of clients by drawing on the perspectives, values, and experiences of the counseling profession and those of colleagues from other disciplines (ACA, 2014, D. 1. C., p. 10). The ACA Code of Ethics also compels counselors to respect client rights, including those regarding confidentiality, in interdisciplinary treatment contexts (ACA, 2014, A. 2. b., p. 4; B. 3. b., p. 7). The CACREP (2009) training standards emphasize the importance of teaching counselors to understand the functions of other human service agencies and to learn strategies for inter-agency collaboration. In these standards, addictions, marriage, couples, family and career counselors are required to be familiar with the roles of other mental health professionals, and in the clinical mental health counselor standards, the importance of learning how to develop relationships across helping professions and interdisciplinary treatment teams is highlighted. Additionally, school counselors-in- training under CACREP standards also must learn models of consultation and collaboration as a part of their training programs. Despite these standards, counselors appear to navigate the challenges of interdisciplinary collaboration with limited understanding and experience. Little has been written about interdisciplinary training or the development of interdisciplinary competencies by counseling professionals (Bemak, 1998). Counseling literature and training standards appear to operate from the premise that the process of professional development is automatically accompanied with the acquisition of skills to work in interdisciplinary teams. In contrast, the medical field and associated disciplines have actively documented interdisciplinary training initiatives as a means for facilitating interdisciplinary competencies among their professionals (Pollard & Miers, 2008). For example, in the United Kingdom, the integration of Interprofessional Education (IPE) is now mandatory in the fields of health and social care, with students being required to complete specific modules that have practical interdisciplinary components (Pollard & Miers, 2008). Medicine in the United States also is actively pursuing interdisciplinary training models with the support of the Institute of Medicine, which recognizes interdisciplinary teamwork as key to effective service delivery (Institute of Medicine, 2003; McNair, 2005). Therefore, while counselors continue to make a case for the value of interdisciplinary work, what remains unclear in the literature is how counselors can attain competence in facilitating and participating in interdisciplinary collaborative practices. It is particularly critical to examine how these competencies can be developed while neophyte counselors are also in the foundational stages of their professional development. The purpose of this article is to use the experiences of one counselor education program currently engaged in an interdisciplinary training project as a framework for exploring some critical benefits and challenges of interdisciplinary training processes. This article provides a detailed description of the counselor education program’s training module and also describes steps the program has taken to prepare students for interdisciplinary training contextual dynamics, measures the program has taken to advocate for the counseling profession, and efforts to enhance students’ understandings of their professional roles in an interdisciplinary context. Using practical examples grounded by interdisciplinary literature, we expand understanding of shared interdisciplinary values and provide recommendations for more effective practices and future research.