Confidentiality and Ethics

Hope Park Counselling Centre is a confidential service where difficulties and issues are discussed with sensitivity and respect.

Hope Park Counselling Centre offers a confidential relationship between counsellor and client. Information on client attendance, contact details and other information from the initial appointment and counselling sessions is held electronically on a database. Personal client information is not passed onto to anyone outside the service except where:

A counsellor has the consent of the client to disclose the information
A counsellor would be liable to civil or criminal court procedure if the information was not disclosed
A counsellor believes the client and/or others are in serious danger In these circumstances the minimum amount of information is passed on, in discussion with the Practice Development Manager.

The counsellor will normally encourage the client to share information to a relevant person or agency. If there is no indication that this has happened, or is likely to happen, or if the crisis or danger is sufficiently acute, the counsellor may pass on the information without the prior knowledge of the client.

Professional Ethics

Hope Park Counselling Centre is supported by Counselling and Psychotherapy at the University of Edinburgh. Counselling and Psychotherapy is an organisational member of COSCA, Scotland’s professional body for counselling and psychotherapy.

All counsellors working at Hope Park Counselling Centre do so within the ethical frameworks of COSCA (Counselling and Psychotherapy in Scotland) www.cosca.org.uk and BACP (British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy) www.bacp.co.uk. These frameworks are available on the websites above.

Counsellor Supervision

All counsellors have regular supervision with an external supervisor, to reflect on their work with clients. In these discussions counselling sessions may be discussed and the identity of the client is kept confidential.

Data Protection and Privacy

Hope Park Counselling Centre gathers and holds information about clients in electronic format on a database at Hope Park. All information is kept securely and confidentially. Paper copies of information are shredded.

Under the Data Protection Act, clients have a right of access to all of their notes. If notes contain references to other individuals these may not be available to the client, as protection is also granted to third parties. If the client wishes to see their file they should ask their counsellor, giving one week’s notice.

For more information, please see our Privacy Notice.

This article was published on 15 Feb, 2022