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Services
Clinical Services
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.
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
Full-cost counselling often costs more money than people can afford,
and one of the aims of the Bridge has been to offer a service to
people regardless of their ability to pay for it. We launched our
first clinical service in 1988 – a brief counselling service for
individual adults and young people in crisis. This now offers
sessions on a sliding scale, relating to people’s income. Last year
70% of our clients were only able to afford the lowest fees on this
scale. In 1994, we established a counselling and psychotherapy
service for children, parents, couples and families. The fees we
charge for this service only represent about half the true cost to
the Bridge Foundation. At the same time, we began to plan a free
service for families who might have little knowledge of counselling
and minimal access to such services. We consulted widely and
following a fund-raising drive, we were able to launch the Cabot
Project in 1998.
The pilot project consisted of 2 small services within the Bristol
inner city, each offering up to 6 sessions at weekly intervals:
- A counselling service for
parents or couples with a child aged 11 or under
- A psychotherapy service for
families with a child aged 5 or under.
The Cabot project has been
strikingly successful. Referrals are made directly by families
themselves, either at the recommendation of previous users of the
service, or by local professionals in the area – e.g. teachers,
health visitors, GPs or social workers. Families normally attend all
6 sessions (attendance in 2000-01 was 80%). Four out of ten families
attending are black (in an area where the ethnic balance includes
25% black people). We have very positive feedback from the families
themselves and from local professionals.
The Cabot project also runs other projects including a counselling
service for refugee and asylum seeking adolescents and their
families, based at the City Academy in St. George and the Someone To
Talk To service for parents of children under five, based at Easton
Community Nursery.
Building Bridges Project
The Bridge
Foundation has been awarded European Union funding to provide a
counselling and psychotherapy service for women in the Bristol
city-region. Offered both from the Bridge Foundation’s own
premises and through community friendly outlets across Bristol, the
Building Bridges project will run for
three years from Spring 2005 until the end of 2007. The new
free service will offer counselling and therapy to help women who
would not otherwise be likely to access mental health services -
women refugees, single parents, women with disabilities, victims of
domestic violence, for example - especially those from black and
minority ethnic communities, for whom statutory services are often
inaccessible or inadequate. A further phase of the project
(starting 2006) will offer support to women managers experiencing
barriers within the workplace.
We welcome agencies or organisations who would
like to work in partnership (and with some matching funding) with
us. Enquiries are also welcome from the statutory sector and
from voluntary/community organisations who might wish to refer
potential clients. Individual women to whom confidential and
specialist counselling and therapy might be of help, are also
welcome to contact us directly.
Enquiries to: Annabelle Patel 0117 9424510
e-mail
bridgefoundation@tinyonline.co.uk
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.
Fees
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