Inside Counselling in Primary Care (Centre for Community Care & Primary Health Series)

by Marilyn Pietroni (Author), Alison Vaspe (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  1999

  $3.24

  This is the real-life experience of the counselling service, which is part of the pioneering primary care team at the Marylebone Health Centre, a busy inner city general practice. It tells the story of the counselling team in action, setting up a service, managing and supervising counsellors, evaluating and auditing the work, and working as part of a multi-professional team, which is itself part of a network of community services, taking an integrated approach to health and social care. The authors draw on three conceptual frameworks to aid their understanding: from a clinical perspective - containment, from an educational perspective - reflective practice, from a socio-cultural perspective - the ideas of postmodernism. The stories offer not only the voices of the counsellors, but also of the patient, and other members, of the primary care team: GP's practice nurses, complementary therapists, receptionists, and the community services. In their own words, a refugee artist, a torture victim, an uprooted schoolgirl, and three single women struggling with lost youth, with isolation, and with bereavement, tell how they experience fear, depression and social exclusion, while the counsellors and other members of the primary care team, explain their thinking as they seek to understand, to respond and to find a shared language. This fly on the wall approach is woven through with the counsellors' analyses, showing the full dynamic of reflective practice in action in the fragmented and transient world of a capital city.