We provide training covering all aspects of professional behaviours, from client interactions to relationships with colleagues, including work on personal and professional values, listening, empathy, self-disclosure, boundaries, probity and ethics.
Our training is relevant for anyone working in human services, anywhere that trust is a necessary component of service and where safety is important. Relevant services include: Health and Medical Care; Psychological Therapies; Clergy & Religious; Social Services; Coaching; Education; Complementary & Integrated Health; Business and Corporate; Criminal Justice.
Our training is preventative, providing people with the skills and knowledge necessary to ensure safe practice, and restorative, providing a space for people to make effective changes in their working practice following a problem relating to professional conduct.
Courses can be purchased as standalone sessions, or as part of broader professional development programmes, for individuals and for organisations.
Types Of Training
One-day coursesThree-Day CoursesBespoke Courses
We run one-day open sessions on Boundaries, Values and Listening. Our flagship course is Introduction to Professional Boundaries. This course is at the heart of increasing awareness about boundaries and how to avoid breaching them, and has been commissioned by churches, the NHS, voluntary sector groups and private enterprises.
Our three-day courses are small-group based programmes which help people in professional roles improve their accountability, awareness and responsibility when an issue has been identified or alleged. The issue could be identified from the individuals own insights, from a complaint, regulator, disciplinary, appraisal, feedback, and can be used to assist with navigating regulatory processes.
We develop training tailored for the needs of the people attending. We have developed and run training sessions for NHS England, Health Education England, Borough Councils, Churches, Hospices, NHS Trusts, Housing Associations and Voluntary Sector groups (see here for a list of people we have worked with). Occasionally we also develop personalised training programmes for individuals who cannot attend the live courses or who require more specialised assistance.
Maintaining Professional Ethics [3-Day Course]
If you have problems at work or a complaint made about you because an action was seen as lacking probity, or being dishonest or unethical, then this 3-day course is designed to help you get back on track and begin to rebuild trust with those you work with. It centres on the core principles of Awareness, Responsibility and Values, and helps you form a plan to avoid future issues arising.
Maintaining Professional Boundaries [3-Day Course]
If you are facing enquiries or complaints about behaviour around maintaining professional boundaries this 3-day course will help you to accept responsibility for those things for which you are responsible, increase awareness about boundary transgressions and to develop a plan to keep people safe.
Maintaining Professional Relationships [3-Day Course]
If you are facing enquiries or complaints about awareness and responsibility around establishing and maintaining professional relationships, this 3-day course is designed to provide an educational and reflective space for participants to examine the roots of their problematic behaviour and to have assistance in making personal and professional changes.
If you are dealing with regulatory issues around practice or conduct issues that don't fall into the other courses we run, and you are open to participating in a large group then please get int ouch.
Introduction to Professional Boundaries [1-Day Course]
This 1-day course is our most popular course and is for you if you want to increase your awareness, knowledge and skills around professional boundaries. Professional boundaries are rarely learned in formal training programmes and this course fills that gap. Run bi-monthly as an open training day in London and available for commission to be run for your organisation.
Professional Boundaries In Practice [1-Day Course]
This new course is for people who need to spend focused time looking at their own situation, most often if there has been an issue raised or complaint received in relation to professional boundaries. Please note that it is not a substitute for the remedial work provided in our three-day courses, though it may be taken in conjunction with them. The course covers the fundamentals of boundary theory and practice from research and the literature and helps to develop and enhance practice.
Maintaining Professionalism: The Fourth Day [1-Day Course]
For anyone who has completed on of our three-day course this 1-day session helps you to maintain professionalism, through a reflective and challenging space, with a small group of peers. It can be taken multiple times as part of a longer-term programme.
This 1-day course is for you if you have completed any of our three-day courses and you wish to re-align your working life: it helps you connect with your core professional and personal values. It powerfully assists you to increase insight in relation to the issues of concern and to assess your working environment and how you relate to it. Re-connecting with core personal and professional values can be a powerful part of remediating after a problem.
If problems in communication have been an aspect of the problem you are facing, this course can be a part of the process of developing insight and demonstrating remediation. Difficulty in listening is often at the centre of communication problems and this course raises awareness and provides a space for developing insight and creating ways of being which are powerful in communication.
In the course of training it became very clear that boundary crossing and violation present issues that appraisers need to fully understand if their appraisal of colleagues is to be effective. Practical examples of how these arise were particularly useful and the discussions that followed were engaging and informative. The facilitator was thoroughly familiar with his material and the balance between the input of theory and discussion of how to put it into practice, which was done in small groups, was well judged.
Mike Perring | Independent Doctors Federation
By making us think in that paradigm, you have potentially changed us for life and we have now the tools to check within every area of life.
Consultant Psychiatrist | Values in Practice Course
Very powerful course that deepened my understanding of myself as a practitioner and as a person. Provided clarity and real purpose to carry forward interactions with patients and colleagues. [The facilitator is] an outstanding communicator. Learned a lot, over and above the course, by watching him work!
GP Registrar | Maintaining Professional Boundaries Course
Since the workshop, I have incorporated “Professional boundaries” as a regular teaching topic for my medical students and junior doctors under my supervision. I have also used the Clinic’s free on line teaching module on the London Deanery site with medical students with very good success. The workshop was a success and we thank you again for it.
Dr Teresa Burrell | North East London Mental Health Foundation Trust
Very well run, very insightful and challenging. Best course I have attended in some time! My main learning was the effects on the ‘victim’ and overall wider effects on others, and power differentials in professional and personal relationships. The course has had a MASSIVE impact, I have learned so much regarding myself both inside and outside work. [The facilitator] was exceptionally skilled and knowledgeable. Made me feel at ease. Non-discriminatory. I wish this was part of undergraduate training. I have NEVER left a course feeling so empowered in my ten year career!
Dentist | Maintaining Professional Boundaries Course
Brought out thoughts that would never have surfaced otherwise – thank you.
Maintaining Professional Boundaries Course
Participants commented on the professional presentation of difficult subjects and how inclusive and containing the presenter was. The session helped counsellors to widen their viewpoints on boundary issues and raised many questions and much fruitful discussion. The day was very valuable.
Mike Keating | Gloucestershire Counselling Services
I am more present, more attentive, more listening [in my consultations].
Consultant Paediatric Surgeon | Maintaining Professional Relationships
Fantastic insight into boundary issues previously hadn’t thought about or considered. Engaging, amusing, relevant.
Despite high-level experience in room demonstrated expert knowledge.
Felt like what you were saying mattered and interested you. You made the time fly by.
Thoughtful and plenty of emotional intelligence.
Participants on Introduction to Professional Boundaries course for Health Education England South-West
Empowering course, made me feel more whole and that I do have values and that these need to be met for me to be happy.
GP | Values in Practice Course
Both my practice and my personal life (which is not what I expected) will benefit from this course, which should be in the medical school curriculum.
GP | Maintaining Professional Ethics Course
This work has been good value for money and it has been good to be in such open and constructive dialogue. I, and the URC, recommend the Clinic without reservation.
Revd Elizabeth Gray-King | United Reformed Church
I learned more about communications in 3 days than I did in the whole of medical school.
GP | Maintaining Professional Relationships Course
In 23 years since medical school (and indeed during medical school) this has been the most effective, interesting and challenging course that I have done. The impact has been immense.
GP | Maintaining Professional Relationships Course
The course helped me identify my core values, reflect on them and identify ways in which personal values can enhance professional values.
GP | Values in Practice Course
Our clients need to demonstrate understanding, insight, reflection and the tools needed to have learned and give the regulator confidence that it will not happen again. That is where the Maintaining Professional Boundaries courses come in. The courses really do make a difference, genuinely helping the individual to make sense of their behaviour and to emerge as a better person and practitioner, often saving their careers as a result. Clients have described the course as “life-changing” and I highly recommend them as the first port of call.
Stephen Hooper, Eastwoods Solicitors
I learned more in three days than in three years. The impact of the course is to change my ways of being, to increase self-care and to develop plans and accountability. There was no forced teaching – encouragement to reflect and self problem solve. I leave the course with a sense of catharsis and a commitment to a new way of being/avoiding all old toxic learned patterns.
Dr | MP 3-day Course
Excellent as ever. Creates a space in which people feel able to share safely and openly. This is enormously powerful.
GP | Maintaining Professionalism: The Fourth Day
All the years of therapy, all the courses I’ve done, none of them got me to where this course has got me to. I feel free to go and do the things I need to do.
[The facilitator] was calm, direct, wise, great insight. He has helped me to come to a realisation about my situation that I wouldn’t have arrived at on my own.
Dr | Maintaining Professional Relationships Course
An excellent and enjoyable course with the trainer focusing on the topics most relevant to our organisation. The course had a very positive impact on all attendees, equipping everyone with the necessary understanding and awareness of how they deal with professional boundaries in the context of their own role within the Hospice. Many thanks to the Clinic for Boundaries Studies for a very worthwhile day.