Client Feedback
An important part of improving the service offered to clients is listening to what they have to say.
It is hard to find any practitioner in counselling or psychotherapy who is ambivalent about soliciting feedback from clients using forms: the whole area is subject to significant and sometimes heated debate about important topics like objectivity and systematic bias, client autonomy, and the potential for devaluing the human experience of counselling.
Getting Feedback is an Important Part of Practice Management
Without entering into this debate in depth, CounsellingResource.com does believe that when sensitively positioned with clients, carefully designed feedback forms can provide one part of an overall picture which will be useful to practitioners both for their own professional development and for improving the service offered to clients. Feedback forms are not by any means the only source of information which practitioners will consider when planning professional development or service quality, and naturally they cannot replace the ordinary verbal feedback received during the counselling hour. However, forms can provide a number of advantages over ordinary verbal feedback:
- Anonymity: Forms completed at home and returned by post provide clients a degree of anonymity and an opportunity to express any thoughts or feelings which they might -- for whatever reason -- be reluctant to convey in person.
- Specificity: Forms can ask specific questions about individual areas which counsellors consider important either for theoretical or practical reasons.
- Quantitative character: No form does a good job of capturing the intersubjective differences between clients providing the same answer to identical questions, but nevertheless a form can provide a quantitative framework for spotting significant trends or consistencies and exploring them further.
An Example Feedback Form
As an example, the feedback form available here is that used by the Managing Editor in his own work. Divided into four sections, the form is designed to provide a clear evaluation of clients' experience in terms of:
- the working relationship with their counsellor,
- the results or impact of working with their counsellor,
- their overall level of satisfaction with the service, and
- any other areas the client might like to flag for attention.
Undoubtedly individual practitioners will prefer to emphasize certain of these areas more than others, and the theoretical framework within which they work will mean that additional questions may be necessary, while others included here will be less relevant.
The form is provided to clients at the conclusion of working together, along with a stamped and self-addressed envelope; every effort is made to let the client know that they are not in any way obliged to complete the form, and some prefer not to do so. Coming as it does at the end of time spent working together, the relationship is usually such that the form can be positioned appropriately and sensitively with the client.
Click the image at right or click here to download the sample form (113KB). (The document requires the free Adobe Acrobat Reader.)
This page was last reviewed by , Tuesday, 22 April 2008.
The URL of this page is:
http://counsellingresource.com/practice/downloads/feedback/index.html
