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Who we are:
The Bridge Foundation is a Bristol-based charity which has worked
since 1983, to pioneer:
• local counselling services for individuals, children and families
who, with the help of experienced professionals, have an opportunity
to explore their difficulties and find ways of moving forward
• training on mental health issues and organisational relations, for
area service providers and colleagues in both statutory and
voluntary sectors.
The Bridge Foundation: A Brief
History
Starting in 1983, and relying on voluntary effort particularly of
its founder Sally Box, the Bridge Foundation has steadily grown. The
early focus of the Bridge’s work was educational, through a series
of public lectures in conjunction with the Extramural Studies
Department of Bristol University. These were given by senior
psychoanalysts and other distinguished practitioners. They revealed
the latent need for this kind of input and generated a great deal of
interest.
Soon the Bridge took over sole
responsibility for what has become an annual series of clinical
lecture discussions as well as some on specific topics such as
Gender Identity, Eating Disorders, Racism in the Clinical Setting,
Self-Harm & Attempted Suicide in Adolescence, Dependency in
Individuals and Institutions. We also started an annual event
linking psychoanalysis with the arts, in order to stimulate dialogue
between the two disciplines which share a belief in the importance
of the inner life of the imagination.
From this base the Bridge has steadily generated a range of other
projects and activities which include a short-term Personal
Counselling Service (established in 1988), a Child & Family Service
(established in 1994), the Cabot Project (set up in 1998, which
focuses on the mental health needs of the parents of young children
in a disadvantaged area of the inner city) and training activities
in areas such as group work and family therapy. The Bridge has also
been a seedbed for new ventures which have been taken on more
appropriately elsewhere, these include the Psychoanalytic Infant
Observation Course now run as part of an MA course within the local
NHS, linked to the Tavistock Clinic.
In the following section we provide a more detailed description of
our present activities.
Clinical Services
To
book an appointment with any of our services please contact our
administrator Annabelle Patel on 0117 9424510.
The Personal Counselling Service
This service is for any adult who
would like to discuss and review their current life situation. It
may be especially appropriate for those with difficulties related to
changes or transitional points in their lives – for instance, young
adults, new parents, and others with concerns about midlife and
retirement.
The service offers up to four sessions of one hour each, based on
the brief counselling model developed at the Tavistock Clinic in
London. It is confidential, open to all-comers, and available on a
self-referral basis. Sessions may include the discussion of further
help if the client requests this. Staff are qualified and
experienced professionals, who meet regularly every fortnight, in
their own time, for work discussions and supervision with the
Foundation’s Clinical Director. There is one trainee placement on
the team, for counsellors at post-diploma level.
There is a sliding scale of fees to make the service more accessible
to people on lower incomes, and clients are invited to discuss an
appropriate fee with their counsellor where they see this as
relevant. Appointments are available both at the Bridge Foundation
and at consulting rooms in South and West Bristol.
The Personal Counselling Service is partly funded by fees, and
partly by the generosity of the Friends of the Bridge Foundation.
Counsellors are paid at an hourly sessional rate for counselling,
and contribute time to reporting, case discussion and follow-up on a
voluntary basis.
Fees
The Child & Family Service
The Child and Family Service aims
to help families with their problems in today’s changing society. It
is a psychotherapy service for parents and their children, working
with all ages from pregnancy, through childhood and adolescence,
into old age. Parents may bring concerns about their children, such
as sleeplessness, constant crying, tantrums, school avoidance or
bullying. Further examples might be difficulties in the couple
relationship, issues arising within a step family, or problems
connected with loss, unemployment, or the demands of a new
baby.
We may work with the family as a
whole, individual children, individual parents, or couples,
depending on the nature of the difficulty and who seems to be
affected by it. Our object is to provide the chance for family
members to discuss their difficulties with professional workers who
are trained to help with them.
If there are young children the communication is likely to be
primarily through play and child therapists include toys in their
work.
The service responds promptly to enquiries, is easily accessed by
phone, and families may refer themselves or be referred by a
supporting agency, such as the Health Authority, Area Social
Services, or legal representatives in court proceedings. The service
is open-ended, so that clients may decide with their worker how long
they wish to continue. Sessions are 50 minutes to an hour, and take
place at the Bridge Foundation. There is a
standard fee at a subsidised rate for clients who self-refer, and a
full-rate fee for agency referrals.
The service is provided by a team
of 12-14 professionally qualified and experienced staff with a
variety of different backgrounds, including adult and child
psychotherapists and family counsellors. They work on a sessional
basis.
Supervision is available to all
staff according to individual needs, and is a requirement for those
without a full psychotherapy qualification.
The service is currently funded by client or agency fees.
Fees
The Cabot Project
The project offers a free counselling service to parents with young
families in the inner-city area of central Bristol. It also offers
support to local professionals in their work with, and referral of,
families experiencing emotional difficulties. It is located in one
of the most disadvantaged areas of the city, as identified by the
latest Bristol City Council profile on Poverty in Bristol (1996).
The Cabot project is open to:
1. any parent with a child of 11 or under, living (or at school in)
the project area.
2. children under 5 and their families, living (or registered with a
nursery) in the project area.
3. staff of local statutory and voluntary sector organisations who
work with children and families.
The counselling is free but limited.
Staff include a family counsellor, a psychotherapist and a child
psychotherapist.
This is an expanding service which will be growing over the next few
years. It is funded by private donations and local Trust funds.
Supervision & Consultation Services
Professional and Organisational
Consultation
Professional Supervision
The Bridge Foundation offers a clinical supervision service to local
organisations, with the aim of supporting practitioners in the
development of their team’s clinical and/or work practice. This has
been used both by voluntary sector and statutory sector
organisations, sometimes for individual, sometimes for team work.
Sessions are offered at the Bridge but can be arranged elsewhere,
and vary in length depending on the size of the group.
Staff are professionally qualified and experience in supervision,
with relevant clinical experience in the areas of child
psychotherapy, family counselling, and psychotherapy. They are paid
a sessional rate for the time spent in supervision, and contribute
preparation and follow-up work on a voluntary basis. The Bridge
Foundation provides supervision to 2-4 organisations at any one
time. The service is funded by client fees.
Organisational Consultation
Linked to the development in Group Relations training, the Bridge
now provides a consultation service to organisations. This aims to
support members of management and/or staff in identifying and
thinking through the often unconscious processes at work, which may
be affecting the life and work of their organisation. It may be
relevant to organisations in periods of transition and
re-structuring, or to groups dealing with recurrent difficulties, or
experiencing a particular problem which is proving hard to address.
The service is run by a small team of staff with professional
experience in group relations and organisational consultancy work.
Planning and preparation time are partly costed into the hourly rate
for time spent in consultation, and partly contributed by staff on a
voluntary basis. The team comes together in members’ own time for
work discussions and supervision.
The Organisational Consultation service is currently working with 3
organisations in the public and private sector. It is funded by
client fees.
Lectures and Conferences
The Bridge Foundation runs an
annual series of lectures and conferences, which take the following
forms:
1. clinical papers by some of the leading practitioners in the field
of psychoanalysis.
2. papers dealing with the application of psychoanalytic principles
in a wider context – for instance, to social institutions, political
processes, medicine and science.
3. arts-linked events, where a shared theme is addressed and
discussed from different perspectives – for instance, that of
literature or music as well as psychoanalysis – allowing for
fruitful dialogue to develop between them.
Programmes include time for the discussion of these ideas by
conference participants. There are 3-4 Conferences a year, each of
which attracts a large audience, bringing together different people
from a range of backgrounds, including the caring professions and
local arts and academic communities.
The events are organised by the
Conferences Group which meets on a voluntary basis. They are funded
by registration fees, with concessionary places available at
half-price to students and the unwaged.
Training Events
The Bridge Foundation has been active in developing local training
opportunities in three key areas:
1. Group Relations
2. Family Therapy
3. Local organisation training.
Group Relations
The
Bridge Foundation has
pioneered the regional development of experiential Group Relations
workshops, conferences, and application groups, in the tradition of
the Tavistock Institute, an approach developed for over 30 years and
adopted all over the world. The events aim to provide participants
with opportunities to look at, and learn from, an experience of
group life, so as to promote an understanding of the organisations
we form part of, and how they work.
At the outset, events were organised every two years, combining an
Introductory Study day with a weekend Conference. The programme has
now expanded to embrace an annual weekend conference, planned in
collaboration with the University of the West of England MSc in
Group Relations, and followed by the equivalent of a term of
applications groups. These events are well attended by members
drawn partly from students and members of the University and partly
from public, private and voluntary sectors in and around Bristol.
They are staffed by a combination of Bridge and UWE staff, with
professional experience and qualifications in the field. Staff are
paid for time spent on training events, and contribute planning and
preparation time on a voluntary basis.
The Group Relations programme is funded through members registration
fees, and support from the University of the West of England. It is
sometimes possible to offer bursaries to members on low incomes.
Family Therapy
In September 2000, the Bridge
launched a one-year post qualifications course in Psychotherapy with
Families, co-sponsored by the Severnside Institute for
Psychotherapy. The course aimed to provide a basic understanding of
the concepts and principles which underlie an analytic,
object-relations framework for psychotherapy with couples and
families; and to give an opportunity for trained practitioners to
develop their own work in this area through sharing and discussing
it with others in clinical groups.
The first course was held at St Christopher's School in Bristol, and
staffed by a mix of local and visiting practitioners chosen for
their experience and eminence in the field of child, couple or
family therapy. It was the first course of its kind to be organised
in the UK, and the feedback from members was very appreciative and
positive. In its first year, it recruited 15 members from a range
of public and voluntary sector services.
The Family Therapy course is funded by members’ registration fees,
and – in the first year – by small grants from the Association of
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy in the NHS, and the Severnside
Institute for Psychotherapy. Lecturing staff contribute their time
at a subsidised rate to keep costs down. Some bursary places are
offered to people on lower incomes.
Training for volunteer counsellors
This is a new area of work which
has grown over the last year, out of a request for training from
Cruse, an agency providing bereavement counselling. Cruse approached
the Bridge with an invitation to plan and run a training programme
on counselling skills, for experienced bereavement counsellors who
wanted to launch a new service for bereaved children, and themselves
to develop the requisite new skills. The first course took place in
early 2001, beginning with a week-end training, followed by a series
of evening sessions and follow-up work discussion meetings.
It provided training for 10 counsellors, and was funded by Cruse.
Bridge’s ‘added value’
Besides the range of direct services that it provides, the Bridge
Foundation “adds value” to the city of Bristol in other ways. For
over a decade it has organised public lectures and conference
programmes focusing both on clinical issues and on the social
applications of psychodynamic perspectives. A substantial network of
psychiatrists, psychologists, counsellors, organisation consultants,
academics and others in the region, have derived considerable
benefit from these educational activities and in this sense the
Bridge has contributed directly to cultural capacity building in the
city. The Bridge has acquired a reputation for attracting key
figures in psychoanalysis and child psychotherapy in the UK to
Bristol. Some of its events, for example the seminar on the public
response to the death of Princess Diana, have attracted national and
even European TV and press coverage.
As a consequence, outside of London, Bristol has now emerged as a
centre of excellence in this area, a reputation boosted by the
thriving Psychosocial Studies Research Centre at the University of
the West of England, which is closely linked to the Bridge through a
number of joint activities. The Bridge is therefore one of several
distinctive elements of the cultural vitality of the city which adds
to its attractiveness as a place to live and work, particularly for
those in professional occupations.
The Bridge Foundation: Management &
Staffing
At the moment the Bridge relies on a combination of voluntary, paid
sessional and employed workers. The organisation is led by a paid
Director. All of the projects and services listed in the previous
section are led by a coordinator (working on a voluntary basis a
minority of whom receive a small honorarium for the work they put
in). Coordinators make up the Bridge’s Professional Advisory
Committee, chaired by the foundation’s Director, and accountable to
the Board of Trustees.
Contact Name and Address
Annabelle Patel
Administrator
The Bridge Foundation
12 Sydenham Road
Bristol
BS6 5SH |
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Murray Stewart
Chair of Trustees
The Bridge Foundation,
12 Sydenham Road,
Bristol
BS6 5SH |
Tel: 0117 942 4510 Fax: 0117
942 7878
e-mail:
info@bridgefoundation.org.uk
Registered Charity No. 1073759
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