Clinical Counselling in Primary Care

Although more counsellors than ever before are being employed in a medical setting, existing literature on primary care counselling contains insufficient examination of its complexities and of its various therapeutic applications.Clinical Counselling in PrimaryCarefills this gap. In the light of the current professionalization of counselling, it looks at the variety of original and creative solutions that practitioners have developed to meet the challenges of this setting. While highlighting the still-considerable differences between each practice, it takes the view that, if counsellors can work with the healing power inherent in the setting, then they have an important tool for therapeutic change. The book examines the broader conceptual framework of clinical counselling in primary care and establishes a distinction between the different ways of seeing clinical practice in this setting. A range of important clinical issues -- such as the therapeutic framework, seeing the clinical work aspart of the greater whole and the need to develop suitable therapeutic models -- are discussed.