Today, we're looking at an important topic for allied health assistants (AHAs) in providing ethical health, support and care services: can AHAs accept gifts from clients?

Many clients and their care-givers want to thank an AHA for services and care that has contributed to their emotional and physical wellbeing.

Accepting a gift may seem harmless, but it can have unintended consequences and compromise the trust and professionalism that is essential for healthy AHA-client relationships. 

By accepting a gift from a client, you can also breach a funding (e.g. NDIS Code of Conduct) or workplace (e.g. Victorian Disability Services Code of Conduct for Disability Workers) requirement, or even the law (e.g. National Code of Conduct for Healthcare Workers, as applies in some Australian states). Practising Members of AHANA, and Student Members, also risk breaching Principle 1 of the AHANA Code of Conduct by accepting gifts from clients. Members can face disciplinary action for breaching the AHANA Code, which is designed to ensure that AHAs provide the highest standard of ethical, quality health care and support.

Some of the reasons why you should not accept gifts, and why you should definitely not solicit (i.e. ask for) them, are:

• Ensuring impartiality and fairness: Accepting gifts can create an imbalance in the therapeutic relationship. All healthcare workers, including AHAs, must provide services to clients based on their needs, without any bias or favouritism. Accepting or soliciting gifts could impact your ability to provide fair and impartial treatment. Even if you know that it would not compromise you in that way, accepting a gift can create the impression that someone who does not offer a gift will receive poorer access to or quality of care than someone who does. This is damaging to your reputation and to the whole AHA workforce.
• Preventing conflicts of interest: By accepting gifts, healthcare workers risk creating conflicts of interest. Your primary responsibility is to act in the best interests of your clients. Accepting gifts can cloud your judgment and make it difficult to make decisions solely based on what is best for the client's needs and wellbeing.
• Preserving professional boundaries: Professionalism is one of the cornerstones of AHA practice. You have a duty to maintain appropriate boundaries with clients to ensure you and other AHAs always have their trust. Accepting gifts may blur these boundaries and lead to misunderstandings about the nature of the therapeutic relationship.
• Protecting vulnerable clients: Many of our clients are vulnerable, relying on us to provide them with compassionate and unbiased care. By accepting or soliciting gifts, you risk exploiting the vulnerability of clients and care-givers. Exploitation compromises trust in the healthcare system as a whole and can prevent people from seeking out the care that they need, out of concern they may be exploited.
• Avoiding conflicts with the law: In some Australian states, the National Code of Conduct for Healthcare Workers makes accepting or soliciting gifts from clients unlawful as well as unethical. Breaching the Code can have serious consequences, including disciplinary action such as a prohibition order preventing you from working as an AHA.

Suggested steps for dealing with offers of gifts

Step 1 -  Explain the ethical reasons for why you cannot accept the gift. Many clients and care-givers will understand, and respect you for upholding your professional standards. 

Step 2 - Explain the potential consequences for you of accepting the gift. The person offering you the gift must be grateful to you, in order to want to give you a gift, and will want the best for you.

Step 3 - If you have tried the first two steps and feel like you absolutely cannot refuse the gift, for example in some cultures refusing a gift may be offensive and could impact your ability to work with the members of that community in the future, and it is a small one in financial terms (e.g. less than $50), you may decide to accept it provided it will not cause you to breach any workplace requirements. However, if you do, you must declare it to your employer and/or workplace following any policies in place for reporting gifts and be prepared to explain your reasons for accepting it.

By politely and kindly refusing gifts when they are offered to you—and never asking for them—you uphold the integrity of our profession, foster trust in all AHA-client relationships, and ensure that people receiving allied health services from AHAs receive the quality of care that all Australians deserve. Together, we can make our health and care systems stronger and supportive for the people we joined the AHA workforce to care for.