Dudley Talking Therapy Service

When you contact the Talking Therapies Service to arrange your first appointment, the administrative staff member will ask you a bit about yourself. They will need to know your full name, date of birth, address, marital status, GP surgery etc. The administrative staff member will also ask for your consent to contact you using your preferred method, this may be by letter, phone call, email or text. You can choose to be seen by a male or female therapist if you prefer.

The administrative team will try their best to arrange an appointment with you for a time that is convenient for you. We can offer telephone or face-to-face first appointments. All of our first appointments will be carried out within six weeks of you contacting us.

Your first appointment could last about 30 minutes. They are usually conducted by a clinician called a Psychological Wellbeing Practitioner (PWP). The PWPs are specially trained to carry out these types of appointments. The PWP will use this time to learn a bit more about you, and how we can best help you as a service. We will discuss the choices of treatment that are available to you, this might mean that we signpost you to another organisation that may be better suited to help you.

If we are able to help you within our service and you decide that you want to go ahead with the treatment we offer, we will discuss all the appropriate treatment options with you. We will work very hard to make sure that you receive a treatment appointment within 18 weeks after your first appointment. We will write to your GP surgery to let them know that you have attended a first appointment with our service, and outline your agreed plan of treatment

Your treatment with our service will be carried out over a period appropriate to your needs; this could mean anything from 6 weeks of appointments up to 20 weeks of appointments. Also, dependent on your needs, the treatment appointments offered to you may be carried out either by telephone or face-to-face at a venue within the Dudley area. We may also offer you a treatment that you are to carry out at home at a time to suit you through the use of a computerised programme; this is called Computerised Cognitive behavioural therapy or CCBT.

Please see our Talking Therapy Service leaflet for further information about the choices of treatments we offer.

We may offer you treatment appointments on the same day and time each week, but we are flexible with this. A treatment appointment can last anywhere from 30-90 minutes depending upon on the type of treatment you have agreed to receive. Each time you come for a treatment appointment you will need to complete some standard questionnaires. This will help to show you how the therapy is working.

It is important that you attend all the appointments we offer you to make sure the therapy works; missing appointments can make it more difficult for you to get better. Sometimes we may also ask you to consider taking medication as well as having Talking Therapy appointments.

If at any time you or your therapist do not feel that the therapy is meeting your needs, they will discuss with you any other options available.

Confidentiality is respected at all times unless the therapist feels that you may hurt yourself, someone else, or there are others you know who may be at risk of harm.

In this situation, they may speak to others, such as your GP or the crisis team about these concerns. This will all be discussed with you at the beginning of your treatment.

Once you have completed your course of treatment with us, we will review whether the treatment has worked. If you are happy with the outcome of the treatment you will be discharged from our service. If it is shown that the treatment has not been successful we will discuss with you any other options available for further treatment.

At this time we will also write to your GP to advise them of the outcome of your treatment.