Protecting Undergraduate Volunteers: Balancing Confidentiality With the Duty to Protect and/or Warn

Graduate programs often utilize undergraduates as volunteers for clinical assessment classes, potentially leading to difficulties regarding confidentiality, duty to protect, or duty to warn. For example, undergraduates are often guaranteed anonymity, yet should confidentiality be broken if students are deemed at risk? Our proposed solution both maintains the training experience for graduate students and protects undergraduate volunteers by including (1) an informed consent document with limits to confidentiality, (2) procedures should an emergency occur, (3) limitations on the hours and locations of assessments/scoring so faculty are available, (4) not allowing undergraduates to role-play, and (5) counseling services information for volunteers.