WORKPLACE COUNSELLING
Welcome to Arc Workplace Counselling Scheme for local businesses to the Axe Valley for supporting their employees' emotional health.
Both our executive and clinical teams are vested in delivering the best of services. We welcome all feedback and suggestions to ensure that the service meets its commitment to you and your staff; for more information on how to join the scheme please contact us on workplacecounselling@arcaxminster.org or alternatively please leave a message on 07365901182.
1. Who qualifies for accessing an Arc Workplace counsellor?
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Any local company who has joined our Workplace scheme can access an Arc workplace counsellor.
2. Who supports the Arc Workplace Counselling scheme?
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Our charity has appointed 2 part-time therapists who have the skills and experience to support a wide range of mental health presentations: Charlie Barrett and Cathy Parsons. They both already have considerable experience of working with Arc. As part of their role, they welcome opportunities to be introduced to the companies whose staff they might support. They have already put in place an exciting provision of both indoors and outdoors therapies.
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3. How can staff referrals be made?
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Human Resource and Personnel department can refer their staff onto the scheme, who they assess might be struggling with issues of mental health that simply cannot be resolved by interventions at work alone.
Alternatively, your staff can also self-refer themselves, who might want to avoid disclosing their personal issues to professional colleagues or line managers.
Enquiries can be received by:
· emailing workplacecounselling@arcaxminster.org
· phoning 07365901182, our dedicated message service
All calls, messages and emails will be answered by a therapist within 48 hours with a view of setting up an initial meeting within a week.
4. What can Arc Workplace counselling support?
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Our therapists aim to provide easily accessible, flexible counselling for employees suffering from clinical presentations that would normally be dealt with in a primary care setting. This would include presentations from mild to moderately severe, rooted in stress, depression, anxiety, low confidence, bereavement, loss, difficulties in regulating emotions and triggers, difficulties in adapting to change and transition.
In addition, we can support recoveries rooted in traumatised presentations following significant, often tragic, life events. This is thanks to our charity’s investment in EMDR, Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing, as endorsed by both Nice and WHO.
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We cannot support recoveries rooted in specialisms that we do not have the expertise to treat. This would therefore exclude severe recurrent clinical presentations, with or without psychiatric diagnoses, specialist addiction work, sexual abuse, couple relationship and psycho sexual work. If it proved to be the case during the original assessing meeting, our therapists would endeavour to signpost your staff to appropriate services and/or back to their GP.
We cannot support urgent referrals of individuals who are at risk of harm to themselves or others, as we are not an emergency service. If your employee needs urgent help, the following numbers might be useful.
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Accident and Emergency (A & E) - 999
NHS – 111
Emergency GP appointments at your employee’s registered practice
Crisis Resolution Home Treatment Team
Exeter, Mid and East Devon - 01392 674988
Samaritans – 116 123
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5. How effective is therapy?
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Arc’s clinical formulation follows the Nice medical guidelines. We therefore formulate our interventions in terms of Acute or Maintenance work.
Acute work would consist of weekly counselling, for 6 sessions, after which we would expect to start seeing an improvement in distressing symptoms. Reviews are conducted every 6 sessions to measure the clinical effectiveness of the work. With no improvement after 12 sessions, the registered GP would, with the consent of the client, be informed to look into the possibility of medication and further mental health assessment by the local Mental health team.
Maintenance work is offered on fortnightly and even monthly basis when the work has been successful and the client wants to maintain their wellbeing with occasional reviews. These sessions focused on sustaining the improvements achieved, reinforcing new strategies and resources.
It isn’t our usual practice to offer contracts that exceed 20 sessions.
6. Confidentiality
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Our confidentiality terms are clearly drawn into all our therapeutic contracts and GDPR protocols. We appreciate that Reports of progress might at times be required in the best interest of our clients’ care. These clinical reports do not disclose the content of the therapy but their clinical formulations. No report is ever released without the full consent of our clients.