Confidentiality & Record Keeping in Counselling & Psychotherapy

Dr Barbara Mitchels,  is a practising psychotherapist and a Fellow of BACP. A retired solicitor, Barbara ,  combines the professions of law and therapy in CPD workshops, providing a specialist consultancy service for counselling professionals and the BACP and contributions to the BACP’s Good Practice in Action Legal Guidance series. She led the writing of the Ethical Guidelines for Research in the Counselling Professions (BACP 2018a), and other recent  publications include Children and Vulnerable Witnesses in Court: A Practice Handbook (Wiley, Simmonds and Hill 2018). Tim Bond is an Emeritus Professor of the University of Bristol and Visiting Professor to the University of Malta. He has a longstanding commitment to researching and writing about professional ethics for the talking therapies and promoting mental well-being. He is currently a consultant to the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy on professional ethics and standards, a member of the Ethics Committee for the British Psychological Society and the Executive Council of the International Association for Counselling. He is a registered member of BACP and provides counselling supervision and training workshops.

Part I Confidentiality and the law
1. Recording confidences
2. Confidentiality as a legal entitlement – the clients’ perspective
3. Confidentiality as a legal responsibility – obligations of the therapist
Part II Record keeping and the law
4. Record keeping – basic responsibilities
5. Data protection
6. Information technology, telephone and online working, electronic recordings and electronic data interchange
7. How long do we keep records?
Part III Confidentiality and disclosures: information sharing
8. Sharing information between professionals
9. Sharing information in supervision and training
10. Sharing information in research and audit
Part IV Confidentiality and disclosures: policy, practice and procedural issues
11. Developing agency policy and practice and evaluating organisational policies on confidentiality and record keeping
12. Mental capacity, vulnerable adults and consent
13. Children, capacity and consent
14. Victims, and pre-trial therapy with vulnerable adults and children as witnesses
Part V Practice dilemmas: checklists and scenarios on confidentiality and disclosures for reflection and discussion
15. Responding to dilemmas – ethical and legal practice
Disclosure checklists
Useful organisations and contacts
List of legal cases
List of acts and rules
Further reading
Glossary