Client Terms and Conditions
CLIENT CONFIDENTIALITY
Our basis for client confidentiality is outlined fully in our Privacy Policy. This Policy, including exceptions to confidentiality, will also be explained verbally to you as part of your contracting session with us.
The therapeutic coaching conducted in the sessions is confidential. We will respect the confidentiality of our Coaching Sessions and any email correspondence conducted between the sessions. We also hope that anything we have shared with you in the Coaching Sessions or via email will also stay confidential, however we understand that both our duty of confidentiality and our standards of ethical responsibility will be higher to you than yours to us.
The law in the UK protects confidentiality, and we can only disclose information about you or our conversations together with your written consent.
If we need to contact your GP we would get your permission first. This would only be if we need to find out more about medication or treatment you are receiving and how it might impact the coaching process.
We will only discuss your coaching sessions during supervision with our supervisors and/or during peer supervision with our business partners as outlined in our Privacy Policy.
CLIENT CONSENT
As part of your initial agreement, we will need you to actively consent to your special category data being held by us. This consent document is separate from our coaching agreement and:
- explains our lawful basis for processing your data;
- explains how long we will hold your data for; and
- explains your rights to complain if you think there is a problem with the way your data is being handled by us.
On commencement of the coaching sessions, we are all responsible for honouring the terms of this agreement, which make up the therapeutic contract.
We expect you as our clients:
- to attend scheduled appointments on time.
- to be prepared to discuss any issues you want to focus on.
- to be respectful to us and each other in the sessions.
- to give honest, appropriate feedback.
We would prefer for you to keep your mobile phones on vibrate or switched off, so as not to interrupt the flow of the session, unless there is a significant reason for you not to do so.
We do not allow our sessions to be video-ed or recorded in any form or format. If we want to record the session for training or supervision purposes we will only do so with your written consent.
Throughout the sessions, we will all be building a therapeutic relationship, which is a professional relationship and not a social one. Any contact will be limited to the sessions or telephone or email communication about the sessions.
Regarding social media, we will not visit your social media sites whilst you are a coaching client of ours. You are free to follow us but we will not follow you back.
We will not discuss the conversations from the session outside of the sessions if we both meet outside of a session for any reason.
We will be happy to discuss this in more detail during the sessions. We will also not be able to accept social invitations from you during the coaching process nor will we offer social invitations during this time.
SESSIONS
Each session will generally be 90 minutes every week and for the sake of convenience we will try to start on the same day and time, where possible. The initial few sessions will be to assess your suitability for coaching and the therapeutic goals. The coaching we offer is open-ended, as opposed to limited to a specific number of sessions. Therefore it is essential that ending treatment is not sudden. We will review your progress regularly to make sure we are moving towards the goals set during our work together.
FEES
Payment is required in advance, and where clients are undertaking a series of sessions we ask for payment of four sessions in advance. If for any reason you are experiencing problems with meeting your payments please let us know and we can discuss a way forward.
CANCELLATIONS
Because coaching sessions are specifically booked for each couple, we reserve the right to charge for a cancelled or missed appointment. You may reschedule without charge by giving us 48 hours notice. If for any reason we have to cancel an appointment, we will aim to provide you with sufficient notice. You will not be charged for any appointments we cancel.
RE-CONTRACTING
If new information comes to light during the coaching process, or your requirements change, we may need to re-contract. We may also decide together to re-negotiate and adjust the goals, dates, times and frequency of the sessions.
TERMINATION OF SESSIONS
We reserve the right to terminate our sessions at our discretion, for reasons including but not limited to late fee payment, noncompliance with therapeutic recommendations, conflict of interest, failure to participate in coaching, or if your needs are outside of our scope of practice or competence. If we do terminate the sessions for whatever reason, we will also attempt to refer you to an alternative professional and make sure the transition is as smooth as possible.
STORAGE OF CLIENT RECORDS, STATISTICS, PUBLICITY, PHONE CALLS AND CORRESPONDENCE
If you contact us, we may keep a record of that correspondence.
If we text your mobiles, we will make sure that the wording is kept discreet. Any voicemails from you will be removed as soon as possible.
All data will be kept safe from unauthorised or unlawful access or processing and protected against accidental loss, destruction or damage. This includes any data held in computerised systems and in structured manual records, including client notes.
We will sometimes ask you for feedback when you have reached the end of your coaching with us, in order to help us develop our services. We will only do this if you have given us your verbal consent to do so.
If you give us a quote or endorsement which could be used in publicity or training, we will seek your written permission before publishing it.
CONSENT FOR CASE STUDY ARTICLES
In accordance with BACP & COSRT Professional Research Ethics, we occasionally use anonymised combined vignettes of our client cases for articles and training to help other couples with their sexual and relationship issues. The information, if used, does not disclose any individual personal identifiable data and is only limited to the problems causing difficulty in the relationship. Some sensitive data is used, but we usually use a combination of couples’ issues to generalise about a topic to disguise a personal story.
We will not use your personal sensitive data in our clinical case descriptions in these vignettes, unless you consent to allow us to describe the difficulties and some of your background in these vignettes. If you consent, you will also have the opportunity to withdraw this consent anytime before publication.
TERMS & CONDITIONS HISTORY
This Terms & Conditions will be reviewed at least annually by the Relationships Academy DPO. (Date of Last review: 30th July 2020)