The Mentoring Department

• Diagnostic language or clinical impressions. “Client appears bipolar, manic, depressed, psychotic.”
• Drug-screen interpretation. “Client failed the drug test,” or any conclusion about what a result means.
• Level-of-care decisions. “Client needs residential treatment.”
• Medication advice, reconciliation, or counts. “I told client to skip tonight’s dose,” or any pill count by the mentor.
• Speculation, characterization, or moral judgment. “Client is manipulative, lazy, dishonest, attention-seeking.”
• Writing into a referring clinician’s chart. Mentor documentation belongs in the mentoring record only.
• Unnecessary information about other people. Detailed stories about a spouse, parent or friend that are not necessary and factual for the record.

Messy: Client was super anxious and kind of manic today. She was all over the place and obviously hasn’t been taking her meds right. I calmed her down and told her she really needs to take her medicine. She finally got herself together and we had a good session.

Rewrite: Client arrived at 1:03 p.m. and paced in the lobby for approximately 8 minutes. Client spoke rapidly and changed topics several times. Client stated, “I haven’t taken my medication for three days.” Mentor did not provide medication advice. Director of Mentoring was notified at 1:15 p.m. per medication and escalation policy. After the call, mentor and client used the remaining scheduled time to review the client’s written afternoon routine and identify transportation for the next scheduled appointment.

The rewrite removed diagnosis, medication advice, judgment and vague claims. It kept the facts that matter.

No-show example: “Scheduled 2:00 p.m. session did not occur. Mentor called client at 2:05 p.m. and sent approved-channel message at 2:12 p.m. No response received as of 3:00 p.m.”

1. Death of a client, mentor, or staff member connected to a Heights Mentoring engagement.
2. Overdose of a client, mentor, or staff member.
3. Any injury requiring emergency or inpatient care.
4. Motor vehicle accident during an assignment, with or without apparent injury.
5. Client departure from an overnight, live-in, or travel assignment.
6. Any allegation of boundary violation, harassment, exploitation, theft, or financial impropriety.
7. Law enforcement involvement of any kind during or arising from an assignment.
8. Suspected or confirmed privacy breach.
9. Suspension, revocation, lapse, or misrepresentation of a mentor credential, license, driver license, or insurance.
10. Any refusal, non-compliance, or environment observation that materially changes risk.
11. Any request or instruction that would place the mentor outside the non-clinical scope.
12. Any grievance or complaint from a client, family member, or referral partner.

Often misclassified: a privacy breach, any law-enforcement involvement, any exploitation or abuse allegation, and any motor vehicle accident on assignment are Category 1. Same calendar day. A fender-bender at 10:00 p.m. with nobody hurt is written up before midnight, not by 10:00 p.m. tomorrow.

Person involved. Witnesses. Date and time. Factual description in observable terms. Circumstances. Action taken, including who was notified and when. The person’s status following the incident. A consultation record where emergency disclosure occurred. The assigned category. For Category 3, the date and time you became aware. Observations, not interpretations: no diagnostic language, no clinical impressions, no interpretation of a drug-screen result.

Where an event involves suspected abuse, neglect, or exploitation of a child, an elderly person, or an adult with a disability, the mentor’s individual mandatory-reporting duty runs alongside the Heights incident process and is never suspended by any agreement or non-disclosure. Texas is an any-person reporting state.

What you do: if anyone is in immediate danger, call 911 first. Make the report yourself; the duty is yours and cannot be handed to the Director, a clinician, or anyone else. Notify the Director immediately during the same shift; an abuse or exploitation allegation is a Category 1 incident, written the same calendar day. Document what you were told or observed in the person’s words and in observable terms, when you reported, to whom, and any case or confirmation number.

What you do not do: investigate, promise secrecy, wait for permission, or guess about whether the duty applies. If you are unsure, call the Director and call the hotline. The hotline will tell you.

Mentoring is non-clinical, relationship-based support delivered in the client’s real environment, under operational supervision. Four things are never handled independently by a mentor: revising a safety plan, interpreting a drug screen, recommending a level of care, and making or influencing a medication decision. A professional license or personal recovery does not expand the mentor role, and the framework for every unclear moment is observe, support, document, escalate.

What Heights owes every mentor: clear scope written before session one, a named supervisor who answers after hours, supervision on cadence, a re-match treated as a normal operational event, withdrawal from an unsafe situation treated as the expected action, and an ethics consultation channel with no performance consequence for using it.

Train and test on this in the Mentor Training Center: Module 01

A boundary is not distance from the client. It is the structure that lets a close, authentic, useful mentoring relationship remain safe, client-centered and professional. Client self-determination comes first. No gifts or loans in either direction, no holding client cash or cards, no personal social media contact, no business arrangements with clients or families, no sponsorship or step guidance in the Heights role, no religious or political imposition, and no romantic or sexual contact with a current client or anyone served in the prior two years. State only the credentials you hold, by their correct title.

The zone map. Green is generally appropriate: listening, encouragement, goal support, brief purposeful self-disclosure, approved channels, helping locate mutual-aid resources, consulting supervision early. Yellow means consult the Director first: a gift offer, a pre-existing community or family relationship, an unclear hug or contact situation, a request to attend a personal event or do personal work, unavoidable repeated contact outside work, or any situation that feels secret, special, or hard to explain. Red is prohibited: gifts or loans, holding client money, personal social-media contact, romantic or sexual relationships, business arrangements, sponsorship, imposition, service while impaired, coercion, threats, force, shaming, harassment.

PAUSE. Pause: do I need to act right now? Ask whose need is driving this. Understand the boundary: money, secrecy, special access, intimacy, dual roles, coercion, personal values, or scope? Seek supervision if it is yellow. Execute and document. A good test: would I be comfortable describing exactly what I am about to do, including the details, to the Director of Mentoring in the monthly meeting? If not, stop and consult.

Train and test on this in the Mentor Training Center: Module 02

Every session or contact, including a no-show, gets a structured report to the Director of Mentoring within 12 hours, as the Mentor Session Note in Ritten. Reports use observable, countable language and clearly attribute what the client said. No diagnosis, no drug-screen interpretation, no level-of-care decision, no medication advice or counts, no speculation or moral judgment, no writing into another clinician’s chart, and no unnecessary information about other people. A session is payable only when its note exists and was submitted on time. Full detail is in The 12-hour report above.

Train and test on this in the Mentor Training Center: Module 03

If a person is not authorized, a mentor does not confirm that someone is a Heights client, attends a program, receives mentoring, or has any relationship with Heights. Confidentiality covers the information and the fact that a person receives services at all. Authorization lives in the record and is verified before every disclosure. Sharing is limited to the minimum necessary. For an adult client, who pays does not determine who receives information. Approved secure channels only: HBH Mentoring Google Drive and HBH Approved Email, never personal notes apps, personal cloud, personal email, texts, social media, or group chats.

Not automatically authorized: a parent of an adult client, a spouse or partner, the person paying the bill, an employer, a friend or roommate, a referral source simply because they made the referral, an emergency contact simply because their name is in the record. When you cannot verify, do not confirm or deny. Route the request. Progress and session information goes through the Director of Mentoring, who controls every onward disclosure. A raw session report never goes to a family, a payer, a referral source, or an outside clinician.

The habit: stop, check, share. Stop before answering any question about a client. Check the record or route to the Director: who is named, for what purpose, which categories, how often, whether it has expired or been revoked, and whether this channel is approved. Share only if authorized, only what is necessary, and only if it is your role to communicate. There is no automatic weekly family call; frequency is set by the authorization and care plan. The emergency exception covers only a clear and imminent danger or a medical emergency, only with responders directly involved, and only to the minimum necessary extent.

What to say: “I’m not able to confirm or discuss whether any person receives services. I can take your contact information and route your request through the appropriate Heights process.”

Train and test on this in the Mentor Training Center: Module 04

Nobody manages a crisis alone. 911 for a medical or psychiatric emergency or a suspected overdose. 988 for a psychiatric crisis that does not need an immediate medical response. Then the Director or on-call role, who notifies the Clinical Director and, when authorized, the referring clinician. Twelve categories of events are always reportable, on written deadlines that run from the same calendar day for Category 1 to 24 hours of awareness for Category 3. Suspected abuse, neglect, or exploitation of a child, elder, or adult with a disability carries a personal mandatory-reporting duty that runs alongside the incident process. If a mentor is deciding whether something is worth reporting, the answer is report it. Full detail is in the quick reference above.

Train and test on this in the Mentor Training Center: Module 05

Heights Mentoring provides medication support, not medication management. Mentors may give reminders and prompts on a schedule the client and prescriber already set, support the client’s own routine and systems, help schedule and attend prescriber appointments, listen and encourage the client to raise concerns with the prescriber, link the client to reliable information sources, document observable facts or clearly attributed client reports, escalate a discrepancy to the Director, and in overnight or live-in work help establish a secure, private, client-controlled storage arrangement that the client keeps control of.

Mentors never prescribe, dispense, administer, pour or prepare, sort, count, hold, transport, dispose of, reconcile, inventory, or verify medication. They never advise anyone to start, stop, skip, double, delay, or change a dose, never identify an unknown pill, and never call a pharmacy pretending to be the client. Mentors do not force, shame, threaten, bargain, or coerce a client into taking medication. Support is not surveillance. A client’s medication regimen, including medication for opioid or alcohol use disorder, is never a condition of service.

When something does not match: observe the fact, document it as an observation or attributed client report, flag the report, escalate verbally to the Director the same day, and take no further medication action. Medication questions never override the ladder: a medical or psychiatric emergency is 911. A complete answer to “should I take this?” is, “I can’t tell you whether to take, skip, double, delay, or change a dose. Let’s get the question to your prescriber or pharmacist.”

Train and test on this in the Mentor Training Center: Module 06

Create safety without control. Build trust without demanding disclosure. Support choice without abandoning structure. Trauma-informed does not mean trauma-investigating; the clinical team owns assessment and treatment. Six principles in everyday mentoring: safety, peer support, trustworthiness and transparency, collaboration and mutuality, empowerment with voice and choice, and cultural, historical and gender considerations. Predictability is a skill: explain the purpose of an activity before beginning it, tell the client about changes early, ask before entering personal space or moving belongings, and explain what will be documented and what must be escalated.

Notice without diagnosing: write “client moved to the seat nearest the exit and asked twice who would be present,” not “client is hypervigilant because of trauma.” When a client discloses trauma, listen without shock, judgment, disbelief, or interrogation; thank them; ask what support is needed right now within the role; do not ask for details, promise secrecy, or begin trauma processing; and document only the minimum necessary. Ask rather than assume on language, culture, identity, family, and spirituality. If you get a pronoun wrong, acknowledge, correct, and move on. When your own history is activated, that is a reason for supervision, not shame. Trauma-informed never overrides crisis escalation.

SAFER. Safety: what would increase physical and emotional safety right now? Ask, do not assume: what has the client actually said? Freedom and choice: what real choices exist within the plan and my role? Explain and engage: have I said what I am doing, why, what happens next, and any limit I must hold? Report and reflect: what needs documentation, escalation, or supervision, and what did I learn about my own reaction?

Train and test on this in the Mentor Training Center: Module 07

The client owns the goal. Goals are client-authored, in the client’s own words, mapped to one of the eight life domains (recovery and health, purpose, relationships and family, daily living and structure, emotional regulation, community and connection, finances and practical life, identity and values), and behavioral, specific and countable. Mentor-set, family-set, and payer-set goals are not documented as client goals. The skill is clarification, not assignment: “I want my life together” becomes, through the client’s own answers, “I want to use my calendar each night and know my next day’s appointments before bed.”

Status is set, in progress, held, met, or revised, and those labels are neutral. Counts make progress visible; they are never a weapon or a moral score. Motivational skills are used honestly: open questions, affirmations, reflections, and summaries help the client hear their own motivation, not steer them to the mentor’s answer. Ambivalence is information, not resistance. Heights tracks client-defined goal status, engagement, completion, and non-clinical progress across the domains; mentoring does not own clinical symptom measures, sobriety measures, relapse rates, or readmission rates. The real measure: the client needs us less over time.

Train and test on this in the Mentor Training Center: Module 08

If a situation appears unsafe, do not enter it. If a situation becomes unsafe, withdraw and escalate. Leaving is the expected professional action, not a failure. The non-negotiables: do not enter an unsafe situation, withdraw and escalate when conditions change, no physical intervention, no third-party confrontation, use approved neutral sites when a location presents elevated risk, keep reliable communication on every assignment, and treat every safety event as reportable. The stop-before-entry scan covers people, environment, behavior, substances or items, and communication, and it is an operational scan of what is plainly observable, not a clinical assessment and not a search.

De-escalation within the role means reducing your own contribution to tension: a calm, ordinary voice and short sentences, simple choices when choices are real, physical space with no crowding, acknowledging emotion without agreeing with unsafe behavior, slowing things down, and ending the interaction when safety is deteriorating. Do not stand where someone can block your exit, do not put yourself between people in conflict, do not follow an escalating person into a more isolated area, do not pursue anyone who leaves, and never take possession of a weapon or suspected substance. You are not the referee: when someone tells you to make another person leave, you relocate or withdraw and contact the Director.

CLEAR. Check the scene. Leave space and keep an exit. Ease your communication. Act early: withdraw when safety is deteriorating. Report and escalate. Overnight, travel and elevated-risk assignments require shift-start and shift-end confirmation to the Director; a missed check-in is completed now, reported, and documented honestly. This training does not authorize restraint, holds, searching, removing items, clinical risk assessment, acting as security or custody, or transporting anyone against their will.

Train and test on this in the Mentor Training Center: Module 09

Testing occurs only when it is included in the approved service plan or under explicit clinical direction; there is no automatic weekly or service-line testing schedule. Only trained and certified collectors collect or transport samples, maintain chain of custody, and document factual observations. A mentor never interprets results, orders tests, changes frequency, releases results, conducts observed bathroom collection, or takes any adverse action. “Client failed the drug test” is not a sentence a mentor writes.

Consented environment checks happen only when expressly included in the written plan and supported by documented consent; a family member’s verbal “go ahead and look around” is not consent. Use the approved checklist and record plainly visible conditions only. Never search, open personal containers or effects, inspect a person, remove items, or enforce rules. A weapon, an apparent substance, or imminent danger is escalated through the crisis and safety process; you do not touch it and you do not confront anyone about it. A consented environment check is not a search. If you find yourself opening a drawer, you have left the role.

Transport is support, not custody. Before driving a client, all of the following must be true: you are on the approved-driver list; your current driver’s license and automobile liability insurance have been verified; a client-specific signed transport consent is on file; your CPR and First Aid certification is current; and you have completed Transportation Safety training.

On every trip, log the time, origin, destination, and purpose; mileage on your tracker must match your trip logs. A refusal to be transported is escalated, not coerced; you never transport anyone against their will. Any motor vehicle accident on assignment, with or without apparent injury, is a Category 1 incident: handle immediate safety first, notify the Director the same shift, and write it up the same calendar day. You may not leave or deliver a client who appears incapable of self-care anywhere they will not be monitored by a responsible person; that is a stop-and-escalate condition, not a diagnosis and not custody.

Companioning is scheduled non-clinical presence. It is not monitoring, legal supervision, crisis care, or a safety guarantee, and it is never described as any of those, to anyone. Before the assignment begins: Clinical Director approval, a written assignment plan, the client’s signature, Operations confirmation of staffing and rest, companioning training, current CPR and First Aid, and documented sleeping arrangements, relief coverage and handoffs.

During: shift-start and shift-end confirmation to the Director of Mentoring, every shift. No shift extension without Director approval; report fatigue, and ask for safe relief. Medication stays in the client’s control, in a secure, private, client-controlled arrangement the mentor helps set up, never in the mentor’s bag, car, room, or possession, and with no counts at shift change. If the client leaves the assignment and refuses to return, that is a Category 2 incident: verbal the same shift, written within 12 hours, and you escalate for clinical and operational direction. Every after-hours contact is logged the same night.

Nobody works unsupervised. The Director of Mentoring provides operational supervision; the Clinical Director reviews clinical standards and flagged cases. Asking for consultation is a strength and part of competent practice, and no one is in trouble for asking a boundary question. Every mentor attends one in-person group supervision and professional-development meeting each calendar month with the Director of Mentoring. It is mandatory and part of active mentor standing. An absence must be approved in advance and made up through an individual session or an approved alternate within the same month when practicable. Client discussion is minimum-necessary and de-identified whenever possible.

Group supervision is never a substitute for immediate escalation. An urgent concern, an active boundary concern, a confidentiality near-miss, a safety event, or a medication discrepancy goes to the Director now. The monthly meeting is for non-urgent gray areas, patterns, and skills. New mentors, overnight and travel mentors, and mentors involved in a Category 1 or 2 incident may receive intensified individual supervision. Continuing education is annual, including ethics and boundaries, with retraining when a governing policy changes materially and quarterly scenario practice for crisis, escalation and field safety.

Complete the mentor tracker throughout the pay period. Pay periods run Saturday to Friday, two weeks at a time, paid the following Friday, and the tracker is submitted at period close. No note, no pay: a tracker line is paid only when its Ritten note exists and was submitted within 12 hours. Hours must match your required reports, mileage must match your trip logs, and expenses require receipts. The note never holds dollar amounts, and the tracker never holds client stories.

Mentors do not quote client rates, package prices, deposits, or billing-cycle terms, and do not negotiate billing. Route every pricing question to Admissions or Operations. “Rates are shared at consultation, and I’ll make sure the right person reaches you” is a complete answer. Internal mentor pay information is not client, family, or referral-facing.