Quality Assurance Policy - Someone Cares
To ensure we offer a high standard of service to all of our clients, we have adopted the following quality assurance policy.
Quality assurance is concerned with direct services to clients and we have gone a long way towards this by developing our own standards in the form of policies, procedures and protocols. We constantly evaluate how far these achieve the level of quality we want to achieve.
We measure the time between referral and actually seeing the client, do appointments run on time, how many cancellations do we have and who cancels the client or the counsellor.
We have ongoing supervision for each volunteer. We appreciate that supervision is the counsellor’s subjective experience of events and further quality assurance could be measured if counsellors brought tape recordings of sessions providing the client’s identity is protected and the client gives consent.
All volunteers are required to keep a log of all training workshops they attend. We provide training workshops and encourage all counsellors to undertake personal development training. We will build our in house training into a comprehensive portfolio and use it as a practice base for seeking recognition to teach at diploma level and be recognised by one of the universities.
We appreciate that all of this is indirect evidence of what happens between a counsellor and client but it is direct evidence of our commitment to maintaining a quality service.
We have a referral/assessment procedure in place to ensure that clients are contacted with the minimum of delay. At present the number of practising counsellors is 14 but we this will be increased as we add counsellors to our bank.
We adhere to codes of practice reflecting the BACP Ethical Framework for Good Practice in Counselling and Psychotherapy and have policies and procedures in place reflecting this. Our policies and procedures are available upon request.
