The National Counselling Service (NCS) is a professional, confidential counselling and psychotherapy service available free of charge in all regions of the Health Services Executive. Our client group are adults who have experienced trauma and abuse in childhood with priority given to adult survivors of institutional abuse in Ireland.
Established in September 2000, the NCS employs over 70 Counsellor/Therapists who are highly qualified and experienced in working with developmental trauma.Clients can refer themselves directly by calling a freephone number. Healthcare professionals can also refer clients. The core principles of the NCS are consistent with those of the most recently published Irish Healthcare Strategy (Quality & Fairness, 2002).
Ten directors of counselling who have a wealth of experience and knowledge of working with trauma in the public and private sectors globally, manage the NCS on a daily basis. They work together to ensure that there is consistency of service nationally in terms of professional and ethical standards and equity of service for residents within the State.
Since the inception of the NCS, our primary clients have been adults who experienced abuse whilst in the care of the state as children. We have produced two National Reports that outline in detail the range of services available together with statistics illustrating the level of uptake by clients nationwide. These Reports are available on this site to download.
The NCS is committed to evaluation and research.In 2003 we published a piece of research that invited our clients and stakeholders to give us their views on their experience of using the NCS. This piece of research was conducted by the Health Services Research Centre at the Psychology Department of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland and is known as The SENCS Report. This report made 12 recommendations to the NCS and we have based our National Strategy around these recommendations.
We are currently exploring suitable internationally recognised measures of quality counselling and psychotherapy services with a view to measuring client outcomes so as to benchmark ourselves across the European Union and globally.
Our mission is “to listen to, value and understand those who have been abused in childhood, in particular those abused in institutional care. The National Counselling Service aims to assist clients to live more satisfying lives, and in learning from their experiences, strives to prevent further abuse in Ireland”
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