PA code of conduct

Rights of service users

It’s your job to protect the rights and promote the interests of the person you’re caring for. This includes:

• Treating them as an individual.
• Respecting and promoting their views and wishes.
• Supporting their right to control their own life and make informed choices about the services they receive.
• Respecting and maintaining their dignity and privacy.
• Promoting equal opportunities and respecting diversity and different cultures and values.

Confidentiality

You have a duty to gain and maintain the trust and confidence of the person you’re assisting. This includes:

• Being honest and trustworthy.
• Communicating in an appropriate, open, accurate and straightforward way.
• Respecting confidential information.
• Being reliable and dependable.
• Honouring work commitments, agreements and arrangements and, if it’s not possible to do so, explaining why.

Independence

You’ll be expected to promote the independence of the person you’re caring for while protecting them, as far as possible, from danger or harm. This includes:

• Promoting their independence and helping them to understand and exercise their rights.
• Reporting dangerous, abusive, discriminatory or exploitative behaviour and practice to the council's safeguarding adults officer.
• Helping them make complaints, taking complaints seriously and responding to them or passing them to the appropriate person.
• Recognising and using responsibly the power that comes from your work with service users and carers.

Risk

You must respect the rights of the people you’re caring for, while making sure they don’t harm themselves or other people. This includes:

• Understanding that they have the right to take risks and helping them to identify and manage potential and actual risks to themselves and others.
• Taking necessary steps to minimise the risk of them doing actual or potential harm to themselves or other people.

In particular you must not:

• Abuse, neglect or harm service users, carers or colleagues.
• Exploit service users, carers or colleagues in any way.
• Abuse the trust of service users and carers or the access you have to personal information about them or to their property, home or workplace.
• Share service users’ personal information inappropriately in a manner that would breach data protection legislation.
• Form inappropriate personal relationships with service users.
• Discriminate unlawfully or unjustifiably against service users, carers or colleagues.
• Condone any unlawful or unjustifiable discrimination by service users, carers or colleagues.
• Put yourself or other people at unnecessary risk.
• Behave, in or outside work, in a way that would call into question your suitability to work as an approved personal assistant for the council.

More information

For more details about your responsibilities as a personal assistant, see our guide to being a PA.