Frequently Asked Questions
Sessions are approximately 55 mins and are £100 per session. If you are seeking therapy via health insurance the cost of sessions will be in line with their fixed fees.
I am happy to offer therapy by telephone, video-call (via zoom) or face-to-face in St Leonards-on-Sea/Hastings
Thursdays I work 9:30 to 4pm by virtual session (telephone or videocall) and on Fridays I work 9:30 to 4pm by either face-to-face or virtual session
You can email me at drchristianashford@hotmail.com to find out my availability or fill out the form on the contact page. I find it helpful to have a free 15 minute video-call or telephone call to get a sense whether I might be a good therapeutic match for you.
Ensuring that personal data is kept confidential is my priority. Therapy can often involve the disclosure of sensitive information, therefore it is essential that this remains confidential. People working with typically make contact via email or by telephone. Your contact details will only ever be used to arrange appointments and communicate with you. Your contact information will never be used for any other reason and never shared with any other party without your consent and never used for marketing purposes. Information that you share in sessions will only be written in paper form and will not be saved electronically. Your paper notes will be anonymised and kept in a locked cabinet. Information will be shared with your permission to those involved in your care (such as Health Insurance Providers or GPs). You can request that I remove your paper file or electronic data from my records at any time. I may have to keep some information about the service I have provided to you on record for a certain amount of time due to my professional guidelines, but I will let you know about this. I am registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office, ICO and comply with their regulations for personal data.
I am a member of the Health and Care Professionals Council, HCPC and I sign up to a code of ethics. Part of that code ensures that I would only break your confidentiality if I was concerned that someone is at risk (e.g. suicide, harming someone else). The person at risk could be you or someone you have told me about. Typically, I will speak with you about sharing my concerns with other teams to keep you or someone else safe, and people tend to be understanding of the reasons why confidentiality needs to be broken if it means keeping someone safe.
I would always encourage you to approach me in the first instance if you had any concerns or complaints. Working through complaints in therapy can be really helpful and may have some relevance to the issues we are working on (e.g. if a person struggles with being assertive then being able to be assertive with their therapist could be empowering for them). If you do not feel able to discuss your concern or complaint with me, please consider the type of complaint. If it is a complaint about my code of conduct, please contact my professional accreditation body, Health and Care Professionals Council (HCPC). By being registered with them, I have agreed to a set of code and ethics and it is part of their job to ensure I always meet these code of ethics (which I would always expect to do). Alternatively, if you have a complaint about how your data has been handled, then please contact the ICO.
Yes you can. If you need to cancel your session, please contact me. If you cancel and give over 24 hours notice, your session will be fully refunded. If you do not give 24 hours notice, the session will be charged.
Whilst therapy is not always a linear process typically we would have a few assessment sessions focussed on gathering information from you about the main issues and other aspects of your life (e.g. background; family). We would then work towards a psychological formulation of your difficulties (e.g. trying to understand what may be causing or maintaining a person’s phobia of spiders). With a formulation in place we can then agree goals and a treatment plan (e.g. working towards being able to go on my dream holiday to Australia despite the big spiders over there > we will achieve this by engaging in a form of therapy called graded exposure). We would then have treatment sessions with regular reviews built in to ensure we are not drifting and working towards your goals.
This is something that you can consider in your initial sessions. You do not need to sign up to a minimum number of sessions but can decide session-by-session.
Therapy can make people feel worse in the short-term. We have learnt ways of coping the best we can, changing these ways of coping can be really challenging. When someone first starts exercising, their muscles will experience a degree of pain and this is the same for our minds. If therapy is making you worse to the point of impacting on your day-to-day functioning, this would be unhelpful and we would have to think about whether therapy is working for you at this point of time. Another important part of therapy is the therapeutic relationship you establish with a therapist. Every therapist has their own personality and way of working and it’s important you feel you can connect with the therapist you are working with.
A Clinical Psychologist is a qualified and trained professional who specialises in assessing and treating individuals experiencing emotional distress or mental health problems with evidence-based psychological (talking) therapies.
A Clinical Psychologist is a protected title, meaning only those with the appropriate training can call themselves a Clinical Psychologist. This ensures that all Clinical Psychologists have a high standard of training (minimum of six years to doctoral level) and relevant experience. They are trained to use multiple therapeutic models and this allows them to adapt therapy to meet the individual’s needs. The role of Counsellor is not a protected title, this means anyone can call themselves a counsellor. Most counsellors have a significant amount of training, but not typically to doctoral level. Counsellors tend to be trained in one therapeutic model and take a more exploratory approach (e.g. a focus on listening).
As ‘clinical psychologist’ is a protected title, every clinical psychologist will have to register with the Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC). This organisation regulates our profession and so you can use the link here to check my HCPC accreditation just by typing in my name and surname. Similarly, as a ‘CBT therapist’ I am accredited and regulated by the British Association for Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapies (BABCP) and you can check my BABCP accreditation by using this link here and typing in my name and surname.
Yes, I have professional and indemnity insurance with Towergate Insurance.
Yes, I receive monthly supervision, as part of my accreditation with the HCPC I have to have regular supervision. Supervision is designed to ensure that the therapy that we co-construct is evidence-based and helpful. I may talk about you with my supervisor, but I will anonymise your details to ensure that you and the difficulties I discuss remain confidential. My supervisor is an HCPC Clinical Psychologist, this means that they also sign up to a code of ethics and keep information discussed confidential and they are highly qualified.
Sessions need to be paid for in advance (a minimum of 48 hours in advance), but ideally at the point of making the appointment. I have a limited number of sessions and I will not be able to hold the session time for you unless you have paid. If you are having regular sessions, the future sessions will be automatically reserved for you without payment, as long as the session ahead is paid for. Payment can be made via internet bank transfer or cash. I will provide a receipt for all methods of payment. If your sessions are funded by an Insurance Company different companies have different protocols, some ask for you to pay and claim this back with them, whilst others pay directly to me. Please let me know if your therapy is being funded by an insurance company.