For your people
Something has happened to your team
A death, a serious incident, a redundancy round, or weeks of absorbing other people's anger. A bounded programme of real therapy for the people affected, booked directly with us, with nothing about who used it or what they said coming back to you.
Most organisations know within a day or two that their people need something. What they do not know is what that something is, who should provide it, or how to offer it without making everyone feel managed. This page is about that.
The short version: we give the affected group access to a proper course of therapy with a registered therapist they choose themselves, funded by you, for a fixed period, with a wall between you and the room.
The situations we are usually called about
If yours is on this list, you do not need to explain the basics to us on the call.
A colleague has died
Sudden death, a death by suicide, a death that people witnessed, or a long illness that a team has watched. Grief in a workplace is awkward in a specific way: everyone is expected to keep working next to an empty desk.
A serious incident on site
An accident, an assault, a robbery, a fire. The people who were there and the people who arrived afterwards both carry something, and they usually carry it differently.
Redundancies or a restructure
Both the people leaving and the people staying. Survivor guilt is real, under-discussed and expensive, and it lands on the team that has to absorb the work.
A team absorbing sustained abuse
Customer service, complaints, front-of-house and social media teams during a crisis take the anger personally, one message at a time, for weeks. This is the group organisations forget, and the load usually surfaces after the pressure lifts rather than during it.
A public failure your people are living through
When an organisation is in the news, the staff read the news too. They also read the replies.
A difficult return
Someone coming back after a long absence, a serious illness, a traumatic event, or a period of caring for someone who was dying.
The team everybody forgets
When an organisation is in trouble, the anger has to land somewhere, and it lands on the people answering the phones, the inbox and the social accounts. They take it individually, personally, and for as long as the crisis runs. They are also the group least likely to be offered anything, because they are not the people the incident happened to.
Two things are worth knowing about this group. The first is that the load usually surfaces after the pressure lifts, not during it: while it is happening they are running on adrenaline and a sense of being needed. The second is that they will not self-refer while the crisis is on, because everyone is busy and asking feels like letting the team down. Which means the offer has to still be open several weeks later, and somebody has to say out loud that it is.
Practical consequence
Set the term so it extends past the end of the incident, and re-announce the offer once things have calmed down. A programme that closes the week the crisis ends will be almost entirely unused by the people who needed it most.
Why we do not run a debrief
The reflex after a serious event is to bring everyone into a room and have them talk about it. The UK clinical guidance is against this. NICE guideline NG116 on post-traumatic stress disorder states plainly that psychologically-focused debriefing should not be offered for the prevention or treatment of PTSD: the evidence showed no benefit, and some suggestion of worse outcomes than doing nothing.
That is not an argument for doing nothing. It is an argument for offering people a real course of therapy they can choose to take, rather than a mandatory session they have to sit through. The difference between the two is the difference between support and process.
How it works
- You tell us what happened and roughly how many people are affected. One call, free, about fifteen minutes.
- We brief and reserve therapists with relevant experience, and hold hours for your people so they are not queueing.
- Your people book directly with us. Each person gets a free fifteen-minute call with the therapist they pick before any session, so they choose rather than get allocated.
- You get anonymised aggregate reporting. Sessions offered, sessions used. Nothing else, ever. The full boundary is set out on the clinical governance page.
- The programme ends on the date you agreed, and anyone who wants to continue keeps the same therapist and pays privately from that point.
Commercially it is the same four parts as any programme we run: a set-up fee, reserved capacity, a per-session fee and a fixed term. We quote in the first conversation.
One thing to decide before you call
How many sessions you fund per person matters more than almost any other decision you will make here, and the instinct to spread a budget thinly across everybody produces a programme that helps nobody measurably. The evidence on this is unusually clear, and we have set it out with the sources attached on how many therapy sessions actually help. It is worth ten minutes before you set a budget.
Questions we get asked
No, and deliberately so. NICE guideline NG116 on post-traumatic stress disorder is explicit: do not offer psychologically-focused debriefing for the prevention or treatment of PTSD. The committee found no benefit and some suggestion of worse outcomes than no treatment at all. What we offer instead is access to a proper course of therapy with a registered therapist, for the people who want it, at the point they want it, which is often several weeks after the event rather than the next morning.
Tell us what has happened
You do not need a brief or a budget to start this conversation. Tell us what happened and roughly how many people it touched, and we will tell you what a sensible programme looks like, including if the answer is that you do not need one.
Every enquiry gets a reply from a person within 2 hours, 8am to 8pm UK time, seven days a week.
More for organisations
Crisis response for customers
Independent therapy for customers affected by a recall, a safety incident or a public failure. Set up in days, not months, and held entirely outside your systems.
Employer-funded therapy: how it works
The mechanics of an ongoing programme: how staff book, what you are invoiced for, what you see and what you never see.
Clinical governance
Registration, insurance, vetting, data protection and confidentiality. The answer to the first question every organisation asks us.
How many therapy sessions actually help?
What the outcome research says about dose, and why the number of sessions you fund matters more than how long each one is.
Everything we do for organisations
The overview page: what we offer, how quickly we can start, and who each programme is for.