GPs & health professionals
We welcome opportunities to collaborate with you in looking after the wellbeing of our students. Please see below for more details.
Referral process
We appreciate your referrals. Roughly a quarter of the students we see tell us that they have been referred to us by their general (medical) practitioner (GP) or other health professionals. We are happy to hear from you by telephone, but if there is significant background or history you feel we should be aware of, or if you have a view about what in particular the student might need from us, we would be grateful if you could provide us with a referral email or letter.
We are happy to hear from you if you think a particular type of counselling might be indicated and why. This will inform our thinking about what to offer the student. However, it is not generally useful for you to indicate your preferred model of therapy to the student. When we carry out our initial assessment of a student’s situation, we sometimes find their difficulties are broader than the particular symptom they have described to you and a different approach is warranted. If you have recommended a specific therapeutic model the student can be puzzled, angry or even can begin to view counsellor and GP as working against each other. Having taken your view and the content of the first session into account, our multi-disciplinary team will ensure that the student gets what he or she needs, whether that is CBT, a more developmental approach or a combination of the two.
Wherever possible we ask that the student himself or herself makes contact with us to request the appointment. This procedure invites the student to take ownership of the process and avoids difficulties which can arise when students feel they have been ‘sent’ for counselling by someone else. However, we welcome an indication from you that you have suggested to the student that s/he contacts us and we recognize there may be special circumstances in which you feel you need to make the contact on a student’s behalf. If the latter is the case, please feel free to get in touch with us so that we can agree the best way forward.
Psychiatric assessment
The counselling service has access to a medical consultant (psychiatrist). The psychiatrist acts primarily as a consultant to members of the counselling staff, and undertakes psychiatric assessment of students at counselling staff request. Because this is a limited resource, it is not possible for the service psychiatrist to accept referrals from outside the counselling service. If you have a student/patient who urgently requires psychiatric assessment, please make a referral within the NHS.
Where the counselling service psychiatrist has seen a student for assessment and believes ongoing psychiatric treatment is appropriate, it is our policy to inform the student’s GP and recommend referral to the NHS.
Support for students diagnosed with mental illness
The focus of the Counselling Service is to bring about therapeutic change and we often work in tandem with NHS colleagues who have referred students with long-standing mental illnesses here because a therapeutic approach is considered appropriate and of value. However, we are often asked whether we can do ‘supportive’ work and when we explore that further we discover that the referrer is not expecting us to engage in therapeutic work with her/his patient who has been diagnosed with bi-polar disorder, borderline personality disorder, or other mental illnesses but rather hopes that we will see the student regularly and for long-term work in order to help the student to stay on an even keel while at university. Because there is a real need for this we have worked closely with the Disability Advisory Service (DAS) to develop a mentoring scheme, staffed by psychologists, psychotherapists and counsellors, that provides regular support for students with severe and enduring mental health problems so that they can function well at university and achieve their full academic potential. Although we collaborate with the DAS in the delivery of this scheme the management of it rests with the DAS and therefore, if you have a patient who could benefit from this kind of support you or your patient should contact, the direct.