Counselling Co-ordinators Report
This year has seen big changes for
the Counselling Service with increased funding, new staff, more
volunteers and a total re-organisation of the service.
During the year, priority has been
given to embedding new policies and procedures to ensure that we offer
the highest standards of ethical and professional practice in
accordance with the requirements of our institutional membership of
BACP (The British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy). A
range of new service documents and procedures has been drawn up and a
new counselling service leaflet produced. The filing and storage
systems and the statistical database have been reorganized and updated.
The CORE (Clinical Outcomes in Routine Evaluation) evaluation system
has been implemented and is used with all clients to assess progress
and outcomes.
The waiting list of over 30
prospective clients, accumulated during the transition period at the
start of the year, was cleared. We were then able to promote the
service to a range of professionals in the area. This included a
mailing of letters and leaflets to GPs in York and North Yorkshire as
well as to other counselling and mental health services.
In January, we were delighted
to launch a new counselling service at Selby. We are extremely grateful
to Selby CMHT for providing counselling rooms and administrative
support to help resource this branch of the service. Following the
unanimous vote at the AGM to change Survive’s constitution to include
male survivors, we have begun preliminary enquiries with other
organisations providing services for men to help plan and prepare for
this significant future development.
During the year, two successful
in-house training events were held on Risk Assessment and Crisis
Management and Working with Dissociative Identity Disorder. All the
counsellors received frequent and regular external supervision to the
ratios recommended by BACP. The volunteer counsellors attended weekly
group supervision with an external group supervisor. A mentoring and
appraisal system for the volunteer counsellors was introduced and
quarterly counselling team meetings arranged.
The two counselling rooms in York
have been refurbished, benefiting from new chairs, rugs, heaters,
lamps, pictures and shelving to provide a more comfortable and
professional environment for clients. Additional soundproofing has been
installed between the counselling rooms to ensure greater privacy.
This has been a stimulating and
invigorating period of growth and consolidation for the counselling
service. We look forward to next year and the further development
of high quality counselling services built on the commitment,
professionalism and team efforts of the current staff and their
predecessors.
Sue Masters and Val
Wosket