ABOUT

The work of Student Counselling Services is best described by the Comprehensive Student Counselling Service model. The comprehensive model identifies four foundational pillars:

●Clinical services: SCSs provide direct, specialised, culturally appropriate and trauma informed individual and group counselling/therapy, tailored to the higher education context. SCSs also provide risk assessment, intervention and management. 

● Consultation and collaborative services: An important part of the model is consultation with students, campus staff and parents. SCSs provide crisis management and postvention expertise; they provide departmental consultations; and serve on a range of institutional, regional and national committees. SCSs offer inclusive and diverse services to the third-level community.

●Outreach and prevention programming: SCSs offer workshops and groups in skill building; psychoeducation and prevention programmes; psychological and emotional development; and campus community development.

● Training and education: SCSs are involved in the training, development and continuing education of the range of stakeholders across the institutional setting. These include campus staff, student representatives (such as Student Union Officers, class representatives and peer mentors), as well as the broader student population. The SCSs have a central role in empowering the campus community to support and intervene with distressed students by training staff in first responding.

PCHEI members are highly-qualified, professional psychologists, psychotherapists and counsellors and are eligible for accreditation with an accrediting body such as PSI, IACP, NACAP or APCP. Accreditation helps to ensure that practitioners are appropriately qualified and work to recognised standards of professional competence. Accreditation also assures the client that the practitioner will work within an agreed ethical framework and code of practice.