Our Contract

You only have to complete this once.

Your data

I conform to General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) standards and I am
a member of the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). For information on the ICO, see www.ico.org.uk.

When you make an appointment, I know your name and your email address. If you pay with PayPay, your address details will be available to me there, however I do not record that information or keep it anywhere. Your name and email is the only personal information that I need so that we can get together – so it is the only information that I ask for.

I’m required by the BACP code of ethics to keep notes and for the notes to be accurate and appropriate. I keep a short note of our sessions, usually a few sentences, that summarise the main topics and areas that we spoke about. The notes will never include names of other people or analysis of what you’ve said.

All of your data is kept on a private Google Drive, that only I have access to. You can ask for it at any time.

Our sessions are confidential and the only person I will talk with about them is my clinical supervisor, Paul McNicol, who is bound by the same confidentiality. If I do talk to them about our sessions, I would be doing this as part of a process to assess my own practice. I meet with Paul once a month and if you have any concerns or compliments about my practice that you don’t feel able to share with me, you can email them on paulmcnicolcounselling@gmail.com.

Practicalities

If we’re having a session online, you should receive a calendar invite that contains a Google Meet link. I’ll be there a couple of minutes before to make sure everything is working and contact you by email as soon as I can if there are any technical issues. If you are not familiar with Google Meet, please give it a go before our session time.

If the session is in person, I’ll send you my address in advance. Parking is hit and miss but you’ll always get a space either on the street, on a side street or - Tesco opposite me allows for two hours of parking. The nearest train station is Hawkhead, which is about a 10 minute walk from my house. Services are more regular from Paisley Gilmour, which is around a 20 minute walk.

Frequency of Meeting Up

When we’re starting out, momentum is good and I think helps us get to know each other and build our relationship. However I don’t have a rule about how often we should meet. I’ll generally check out at the end of each session if you would like to get together again and if you’re happy to use the online booking system, or if you’d like to put something in the diary together.

I work flexibly with some people in terms of when and how often we meet up, and with some people I have a set day and time. If you would like to work to a specific day and time that is available in my calendar, then let me know and we can work it out without you having to book loads of sessions up front.

Payment

Sessions cost £60 and payment is due at least 48 hours before our session. If you have paid through Calendly and Paypal, this is taken care of at the time of booking.

If you are paying by bank transfer, payment is due 48 hours before a session - if the payment has not been made, I’ll be in touch to check if you still want the session. If I haven’t heard from you, I will send you notification of the session being cancelled.

Cancellation and Rescheduling

Things happen that make us change our priorities and I get that. There can also be emergencies that make any form of planning fall by the wayside. If you have booked through Calendly, you have the option to reschedule the session - you’ll find a button for it in your email confirmation. If we have organised the session outside of the calendar, you can email me to let me know what’s happened and we can work it out.

If you cancel 48 hours or less before our session, I won't refund the money you paid or roll it over into a rescheduled sessions. That’s because it is highly unlikely I will be able to offer that time at such short notice. I would always rather avoid this so if it’s possible and you know 48 hours in advance - please let me know and we can reschedule. Where a genuine emergency (a death, a diagnosis, a care issue outside your control) prevents any of the above from happening, we can reschedule at my discretion.

Social Media

I won’t follow you on social media and there are three main reasons for that. The first is that it risks your confidentiality, in a way that you might not realise or agree too. The second is that I want to understand you on the basis of what we talk about in the therapy space that we have together. The third is that creating new links brings the potential for the parameters of our relationship to become unclear - when your therapy pauses or stops, our relationship does too.

Looking after you and other people

If there is a point during our session where I think you or someone else are at risk of immediate harm, I will say so. When that is the case, for example if you tell me things that sound like a specific plan to complete suicide or the abuse of a child, I’ll slow us down to make sure we are both understanding what is happening.

This is one of the two circumstances (the other is below) where I’ll choose the focus of the conversation. That’s because I don’t want have this information and do nothing with it.  

We might stop the session and talk together about who else needs to come into the conversation – that could be a doctor, the police, a person who cares for you or someone else. Then we will bring them into the conversation. I’ll work really hard to make sure we do this together and to to give you opportunities to be involved in the process of keeping yourself and other people safe.

Keeping right by the law

If you tell me about the ongoing abuse of a child, money laundering or a terrorist plot – I am compelled to tell the police. I will face criminal charges and lose my accreditation if I don’t pass information on - and I am not willing to do that. If these things come up, you will always know that I am going to take the information elsewhere because I’ll slow the conversation down and check what I have heard with you. The law is clear that I do not need your consent or permission to break the confidence we have in these instances. I’ll still work hard to make sure that you know everything that is going on in the event that this happened.

To agree to this contract, please fill in your details below.

If you haven’t completed this, I will contact you before our session to let you know. Our session won’t go ahead until I have confirmation that you agree to the contract.