UTS Psychology Clinic

Margaret Eisdaile, Psychology Clinic Coordinator:

The UTS psychology clinic is a specialist clinic within the One Hundred Broadway Clinic. We're a training clinic for the Master of Cinical Psychology students and they do two clinical placements here as part of their practical component of their Master's degree. The clinic is centrally located in Ultimo, we're in close proximity to the Broadway shopping centre, Central railway and the main interchange bus station at Railway Square. The clinic provides low-cost mental health care to the community. The fees are heavily subsidised by UTS. All therapists are provisionally registered with the Australian Psychology Board and as part of their ethical behaviour they're required to observe all rules of privacy and confidentiality.

Alice Shires, Psychology Clinic Director:

Students come into the clinic as, in a way, a staff team and see clients under supervision. Our staff who supervise, who are academics and researchers in the department, they discuss the cases with the student and really scrutinise their work and that's the beauty of having a training clinic like this.

Gene Efron, Clinical Psychology Student:

The clinic is a teaching clinic which means that it enables the students to put their learnings into practice.

Rachel Verin, Clinical Psychology Student:

There's no substitute for actually working one-on-one directly with a client. Doing it here in the clinic in such a structured and supervised way means that before you go out into the real world you're getting really really constructive feedback from experts in their field.

Erika Penney, Clinical Psychology Lecturer and Supervisor:

We have a whole range of clients that come to our clinic, we have young adults who might come from as UTS students, we have older adults who come to see us, we have adolescents who come to see us and we have really young families, children and parents who come to see us.

Rachel Verin, Clinical Psychology Student:

People come to the UTS Clinic for a range of difficulties, anxiety disorders or depressive symptoms, lots of stress.

Gene Efron, Clinical Psychology Student:

As well as really more complicated or more complex neurocognitive disorders so no two people are the same every person comes with their own unique difficulties.

Rachel Verin, Clinical Psychology Student:

So you get a lot of experience with a whole range of different presentations.

Gene Efron, Clinical Psychology Student:

The clinic has a number of really wonderful innovative factors and one of the ways this is executed is through the B-Line video technology where students can actually watch their footage in real time straight after they've conducted a session.

Rachel Verin, Clinical Psychology Student:

Telehealth is used in the clinic, we actually implemented it really quickly and due to the changing landscape it's really important for clients to have the opportunity to speak with their therapist even if they live really far away, if it's a bad weather day, if they're having a bad day, means that they don't miss a session.

Erika Penney, Clinical Psychology Lecturer and Supervisor:

So our students, because they're advanced level students, they're getting this input from highly specialised supervisors to be able to provide the leading edge evidence-based treatments to clients.

Alice Shires, Psychology Clinic Director:

It provides really a local service to people within the university community or wider community to involve people more and interface between the university and the community that it sits within.