The Duty to Protect: Special Considerations for the Rural Practitioner. 
James L. Werth, Jr., Ph.D., ABPP, Behavioral Health and Wellness Services Director, Stone Mountain Health Services, Pennington Gap, VA. 

Duty to protect situations are among the most stressful clinical events. These already difficult scenarios are made even more difficult when the professional/trainee is laboring under misunderstandings about her or his ethical and legal obligations and when the clinician/trainee does not know how to respond when a potential duty arises. This presentation is designed to help determine when the duty to protect may arise and how to respond. Although the underlying issues and ethical/legal considerations are the same regardless of whether the practitioner is in an urban, suburban, rural, or frontier area, practicing in a rural/frontier location can have implications for meeting the ethical/legal requirements. Actual examples and practical responses will be provided throughout the presentation.

 Learning Objectives

1. Define the duty to protect and differentiate it from the duty to warn.
2. Identify at least three ethical and legal issues involved in determining whether the duty to protect applies.
3. Discuss 2 implications that practicing in a rural area may have in duty to protect situations.

James L. Werth, Jr., Ph.D., ABPP, received his Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology from Auburn University and his Master of Legal Studies from the University of Nebraska - Lincoln. He was the Founding Director of the Radford University Psy.D. Program in Counseling Psychology, which had a rural focus. He now is the Behavioral Health and Wellness Services Director for Stone Mountain Health Services, a Federally Qualified Health Center in rural Southwestern Virginia, and serves as the Coordinator of the Southwest Virginia Psychology Doctoral Internship Consortium. He was the Virginia Psychological Association Ethics Committee Chair for several years before being appointed to the Virginia Board of Psychology; he currently is Vice Chair of the Board. He served on the American Psychological Association’s Committee on Rural Health, and was its Chair for a year. He also serves as Editor of the Journal of Rural Mental Health, which is published by the APA. He received APA's 2016 Excellence in Rural Psychology Award.