Rip-Off Therapy - Too Many Hand-offs in the System

There are a growing number of private therapy providers in the UK who are making significant commercial gains out of the employee assistance, legal and insurance sectors by charging hefty fees for the provision of CBT, counselling or psychological services.

In our experience, these charges can range from double to four times the amount paid to the therapists providing these services.

These charges are typically made by the middle-layer EAP and psychological service providers who operate the administrative gap between the client and the Therapist.

We’ve also heard some real horror stories about poor data management, unqualified staff undertaking triage assessments and breach of ethical boundaries.

These excessive charges and inadequate practices are not in the interests of the client nor the therapist providing a service.

There are too many layers and commercial handoffs in the process and the emerging model exaggerates the true cost of providing quality therapy.

We recently received an Insurance referral made via an outsourced EAP, to a well-known CBT Business who finally subcontracted the service to us. The client disclosed that our therapy charges were only 35% of the total charges made. Sadly, this example is fairly typical.

The UK private therapy environment is increasingly shifting to replicate a multi-layer sub-contracted commercial model, where the needs of the patient and the Therapist are subordinated by the scope for commercial profit.

Smaller commercially responsible psychological services exist; however, they often lack the business skills or scalability to compete with the larger emerging psychological service providers.

At Think CBT we operate on a commercially ethical basis, ensuring that therapists are paid the full rate for the service they provide. We promote collaboration and mutuality without exploiting the client, the system or the therapist.

We provide a network of supervised and accredited Therapists. Our Therapists work as a practice community, sharing resources and working to common service standards. To support this, we deliver group and individual supervision on a monthly basis. This is delivered on a cost-neutral basis to reduce the financial burden of organising private supervision.

We do apply a nominal one-off admin fee to cover the basic overheads required to process clients from enquiry to appointment, however we don’t rip off our colleagues or set ourselves up to compete with each other.

If you are a BABCP accredited therapist working in London, Kent, Surrey, Sussex or Essex, join the Think CBT associate network for access to private referrals and free monthly supervision.

This post is not about self-promotion, it’s about advocating fairness and mutuality in the provision of private therapy.

To find out more, email info@thinkcbt.com or visit our website at www.thinkcbt.com.