Counselling Department in St. Kitts goes through a rebranding process to broaden its scope of practice

Story Credit: SKNIS

Officials within the Counselling Department in St. Kitts revealed that the institution will be undergoing a rebranding process in order to broaden the scope of practice and better serve the general public.

“There is a broad scope change to what we do and so even though people see the National Counselling Centre in a very limited way we are rebranding so people can see the work that we actually do and looking at ways that we can deliver our services so that our resources are being properly utilized,” said the Deputy Director within the Counselling Department, Naeemah Hazelle during the September 22 edition of Working for You.

The Deputy Director said that it was important to consider rebranding and broadening the scope to also improve the working relationships between all stakeholders.  

“We want both our clients and us as practitioners to find ways that we can work towards mutually beneficial relationships and improve the service with the resources that we have and the needs that we are seeing in the community which are ever-growing every day. So, as we look towards our future, we see ourselves, and the Cabinet obviously, saw us the same way and expanded our scope to see us as a National Counselling Centre so that we could look closely at how we are accessing our values of service and how that will be defined in the future.”

Ms. Hazelle said that the aim is to raise awareness of the public to the services of the counselling unit.

“The way that we are broadening our scope we are hoping to do that so that people can get a better understanding of the services that we provide if they need those services and when they need those services, how to access them either through our agency or different referral agencies,” Ms. Hazelle added.

Some of the services include but are not limited to clinical counselling intervention; Employer Assistance Programme (EAP); clinical assessments; crisis management and response; limited online and virtual counselling; psychoeducational sessions, as well as family matters services.

Michele de la Coudray-Blake, Director of the Counselling Department said, “some new things are happening with the Counselling Department as we respond to the needs of the population.” She noted that with the range of services offered, it was extremely important for the department to rebrand.