Exploration into Advice, Guidance, Counselling and Effectiveness of Multidisciplinary Interventions

Introduction

This paper will explore the role of advice, guidance and counselling from the perspective of health and social care practice, the importance of reflective practice and effectiveness of interventions with service users and clients.

The contents of this paper will be split into 4 sections; section 1 will discuss the definitions of advice, guidance and counselling, section 2 will explore effectiveness of multidisciplinary interventions, section 3 will critique the concept of reflective practice within a guidance and counselling context and section 4 will explore the career options into advice, guidance and counselling roles.

Definitions: Advice, Guidance and Counselling

There are various definitions of advice, guidance and counselling practice, but they are however correlated.

However firstly there should be a definition for each areas of health and social care practice.

There are many definitions of each term in practice however, for decades many authors and theorists have struggled to make a simple definition. More to the point, according to Van Dyk (2008), counselling is fundamentally an activity which involves interactions between a service user seeking help of a professional through person centred care and empowerment. Moloney (2005) believes that empowerment is important in counselling settings as it encourages service users to make their own choices through different counselling techniques. Guidance is also a similar term to counselling and they are both interrelated, by giving professional assistance. However Mangal (2007) states that guidance is misperceived as giving directions; it is essentially an ethical process of empowering service users of how they should deal with their personal experiences themselves....

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...ritically evaluating personal experiences, but to recognise self-awareness through these experiences and activities.

Basford and Slevin (2003) suggests that in the practice of counselling, advice and guidance it is useful to be supervised by a manager or another professional. This way the supervisor can oversee any mistakes and errors that the practitioner has made and give constructive feedback about any actions that needs to be taken.

Therefore this is called clinical supervision; it is to improve interventions and services, and also improve service user care. Cutcliffe et al (2001) states the benefit of clinical supervision is that practitioners can receive support from their peers and managers or supervisors. However the process of clinical supervision constantly involves reflective practice which will be continuously implemented in the forthcoming sections.