Counselling is a part of the Student Wellness Centre (SWC) located in the Health and Wellness Building on campus and provides psychological services to UVic students, as well as consulting services to members of the University community. The SWC, housing both Health and Counselling, strives to provide holistic care and service delivery in a fully integrated, collaborative, inter-professional model in close partnership with Multifaith as a third unit within the SWC portfolio.
Our Pre-Doctoral Psychology Internship Program adopts a scientist-practitioner model and is designed to be generalist in nature. Our program provides training in eight core competency areas: individual counselling, assessment, group counselling, supervision, outreach/consultation/program development, applied research, diversity, and professional ethics.
At Counselling, interns are viewed as early emerging professionals who are engaged in much of the same activities as the rest of the clinical team. Interns have access to the same on site training/professional development opportunities as clinical staff, and are included in the weekly case consultations and other planning meetings. All staff members of Counselling are integral to the learning and training environment and interact regularly with the interns over the course of the internship year. We strive to create a learning and work environment that is supportive and collegial, committed to professional development in the service of the client population with whom we work, and respectful of individual differences.
Additionally, we have two training experiences built into our internship: the Counselling Consultant (CC) and the Eating Disorder Collective (EDC); these are part of, and are woven into, the overall competencies associated with our internship and we approach these from a developmental perspective and progression.
As a division of Student Affairs and a unit within Wellness, Recreation, and Athletics at UVic, Counselling is involved in a number of inter-unit collaborations on campus. This includes counselling specific efforts (e.g., Indigenous counsellors available in collaboration with the Office of Indigenous Academic and Community Engagement; group counselling offerings in partnership with Multifaith), multi-disciplinary care coordination (e.g., care coordination team with Centre for Accessible Learning, Health, case managers), and event-based partnerships. Such campus collaborations offer a rich and diverse learning experience for interns at Counselling.
We acknowledge and respect the l?k???ŋ?n peoples on whose territory the university stands and the Songhees, Esquimalt and W?SÁNEĆ peoples whose historical relationships with the land continue to this day.