University of Roehampton’s delivering effective online therapy training to students

Following the global pandemic and with many mental health services and provisions moving online, the Department of Psychology in the University of Roehampton, London with the support from the Placement and Work Experience team has hosted two training events to support our students’ learning to ensure they have the foundational skills to provide safe and effective online therapeutic support.

At the start of the pandemic, many mental health services continued to offer support online. As the pandemic has progressed, there has been a greater uptake in placements offering online therapy. Students have had to quickly develop skills to deliver online therapy to meet this changing need. This change is likely to continue as Covid-restrictions gradually decrease, with Covid fundamentally impacting the way therapy is delivered and online therapy likely to be used more widely.

The first training event,?‘How to do Online Therapy? A student-focused training event’, was held on 22 January 2021 and delivered by world experts in the field, Dr Naomi Moller and Dr Andreas Vossler, (Open University). The second training event was?‘Online Therapy: Getting the basics right’, held on 17 February 2021 by Dr Pierre Cachia, from Tavistock Relationships.

Two further training events are being held. They include Pierre Cachia who will be hosting a ‘Train-the-trainers masterclass’?session to support colleagues’ understanding of online therapy, supervision and training. An expert in online therapy with young people will also be offering a student-facing training event considering working safely and ethically with young people online, also in March.

These sessions have had very positive feedback from our students, who feel they now have greater confidence in thinking about delivering therapy online, as well as a much clearer sense of what practical measures can be taken to ensure a seamless transition to online therapy. Content from the training has been recorded and posted on our dedicated Moodle site to provide a repository of learning resources. This resource will also be available for future cohorts of students.

Dr Jonathan Isserow, Head of Partnerships and Community Engagement in our Department of Psychology said “we have a dedicated placements team (within Alumni, Development and Careers) here at Roehampton to support our students, and they have been instrumental in securing resources to support this training to augment students’ placement experience”.

The University of Roehampton is home to one of the largest therapeutic training departments in the country. The University offer excellent postgraduate programmes in Integrative Counselling and Psychotherapy, find out more here.

Sources：

https://www.roehampton.ac.uk/psychology/news/roehamptons-department-of-psychology-delivering-online-therapy-training-to-students/