Effective Short-Term Counselling within the Primary Care Setting

Valerie Garrett has twenty-five years' experience in counselling and has worked as a primary care counsellor for five years. She now supervises counsellors working in that setting. Throughout this time she has encountered human suffering across every part of the socio-economic spectrum, age and personality type.

• How to Use this Book , Introduction , The Primary Care Setting: Finding Your Feet at the Coalface , Introduction to Part I , Setting the scene of primary care counselling against the backdrop of a rapidly-evolving NHS service , Valuing what you bring to the primary care setting as an experienced or newly graduated counsellor , Introduction and induction into the GP surgery , Finding your place in the medical organizational family , Medical model vs. psychological model , The primary care counsellor's support systems , Whose needs are being met? , The Practice of Counselling and the Impact of the Setting Theory and Practice: Working at the Coalface , Introduction to Part II , Time and how we use it: assessing what is appropriate for the patient , Assessment , Use of psychotropic drugs, their probable impact upon counselling, and their side effects , The contract , Approaches to different categories of patient and presenting problem , Waiting lists, endings, and referring on , Endnotes

'I am delighted with this book - it acknowledges the privileged position of the Primary Care counsellor to make a clinical decision, based upon a clear rationale, to use either a psychodynamic or CBT approach, or to adapt and integrate them to meet the individual needs of the patient.'- Pat Seber, Past Chair of the Faculty of Healthcare Counsellors and Psychotherapists (FHCP)'This thoughtful and comprehensive book, written by a counsellor with a good deal of experience in the field, will provide a useful resource for the many counsellors attached to GP surgeries, covering as it does valuable information on the practice setting and on how to adapt psychodynamic and CBT approaches to the short-term counselling which is usually on offer. Primary care counselling is one of the most accessible psychological therapies available free to a wide range of people, which makes it especially important that the counsellors who provide it have access to books which help them to develop a clear focus for their work.'- Val Potter, past Chair of the British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP)'The opening chapters were like a shot of adrenaline. Written in clear concise terms. Every aspect of primary care work is addressed: the benefits of different theoretical approaches (psychodynamic and CBT), and what happens from the moment the counsellor first walks through the door to the end of a patient contract.' - Oriana Johnson, Therapy Today March 2011 Vol. 22/Issue 2