FAQs

Initial consultation session £150 (60 minutes)

1:1 ongoing session £130 (40-50 minutes)

£150 per session for clients referred by a solicitor or third party organisation. (The fee reflects increased routine administration time for these cases).

Psychological therapy is an investment in yourself to improve how you are living. Learning new skills can give you the opportunity to make the changes you really want. With this investment in yourself comes big payoffs. You might have worked with a personal trainer at the gym, or paid for private physiotherapy. In a similar way, psychological therapy is a course of treatment and is tailored to your individual goals.

Choosing to see a clinical psychologist means that you see a professional with specialist doctorate training in the assessment, formulation and treatment of a wide range of psychological difficulties using evidence-based psychological models

That sounds a bit technical, doesn’t it? Essentially, it means I have highly specialist training and experience in using therapies that have strong research evidence to support them.

So, I do a lot more than ‘just CBT’, which is useful because problems often aren’t straight forward and it’s effective to integrate other approaches. This is the reason clinical psychologists usually have higher fees than some other therapists.

Although we often specialise after we qualify, our competencies and the breadth of our clinical training mean that we can assess and make recommendations for you, even if what you might need lies outside of our own expertise.

In the UK, anyone can call themselves a ‘therapist’, ‘psychotherapist’, ‘counsellor’, ‘coach’ or ‘psychologist’. These are not protected titles.

Clinical Psychologist and Practitioner Psychologist are two protected titles. Anyone using these protected titles must be qualified and they must be registered with, and meet the standards of, the Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC).

The title Chartered Psychologist is conferred by the British Psychological Society (BPS) and chartered psychologists can use the letters CPsychol after their name. The BPS is our professional body. They promote our profession and they set the standards for academic qualifications, but they do not have any role in regulating people who offer psychological therapy services to the public. This is the role of the HCPC.

To work in clinical practice, Practitioner Psychologists (and other qualified therapists) must be registered with the HCPC. The HCPC regulates health and care professionals and they audit practitioners to ensure they meet the requirements of their professional roles.

Whatever your decision about choosing a therapist, I strongly recommend that you choose someone who is registered with the HCPC. This assures you that a practitioner is appropriately qualified to provide the services they offer, and that they fulfil the professional requirements to keep their registration every 2 years. If you were looking for a physiotherapist, you’d want someone qualified and whose treatment was safe and effective. This is just as important for looking after your psychological wellbeing.

It is helpful if sessions are weekly at the start so that we can get up and running. This is particularly helpful when working with depression, trauma, and when there are a few problems to make sense of.

Some people find it helpful to continue to meet weekly, while other people move to fortnightly appointments so they have more time between sessions to practice new skills.

Some people get what they need from sessions quickly, and ACT therapy is an effective brief intervention.

For a lot of anxiety problems and adjustment to life events, people can make some significant changes in 6-10 sessions. When problems have been around for longer and they are more complex, and when people come to therapy with problems in a few areas of their life, we usually need more time to progress towards important goals.

My commitment to you is that we will regularly review your progress together to make sure that we’re on track with goals that are important to you.

I am a registered treatment provider with:

• Bupa
• Axa Health
• Aviva
• Cigna
• Healix
• Vitality Health
• WPA

If you would like to claim via another health insurer, then I can apply to register with them to arrange your treatment with you.

If you are paying privately for therapy, then I request payment in advance of each session by bank transfer.

If you have cover for psychological treatment, then I will need your policy registration number, an authorisation number and some of your personal details.

Once I have checked your authorisation with your insurer, we can confirm an initial appointment. This ensures that I can invoice the insurer for your sessions. After we’ve sorted out these details, I just invoice your insurer and it’s one less thing for you to think about.

There might be an excess for you to pay to claim on your policy. With some policies, you might need to pay a contribution towards the session fee.

Axa Health and Bupa fully cover online treatment sessions by video call. If you are not sure, please ask your insurer. Remote video sessions are now common practice and continue to be popular.

EMDR Association UK & Ireland support the use of EMDR online. Some accredited therapists had been doing EMDR online before the pandemic. EMDR works very well online for a lot of people.

I use a secure platform for video meetings that was developed especially for this purpose. It uses an on-screen virtual light bar for eye tracking that we can customise, and it can be used on all devices, including tablets and smartphones.

I have had great results using EMDR therapy online to treat trauma following road traffic accidents, work accidents, traumatic bereavement, sexual assault and childhood abuse. Two important considerations are that a client has somewhere safe and private to sit and a good Wi-Fi connection.