ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author considers particularly supervision of counselling practice in an organizational setting. The counsellor and, hence, supervisor in primary care are working within a set of dynamics which concerns itself not just with the counsellor–patient dyad, but with a whole team of medical and administrative colleagues. Supervisors of primary care counsellors will be familiar with the various struggles counsellors often have with respect to rooms, lack of time, waiting lists, noise, lack of communication and boundary infringements. The author also considers specific organizational context that of the National Health Service (NHS) and, in particular, primary care. The talking therapies—counselling and psychotherapy—have become established in NHS primary care, alongside existing psychotherapeutic provision within specialist secondary psychotherapy and psychology departments and generic community mental health teams. In the NHS, the transference of the patient is commonly affected by the patient's prior and ongoing relationship to the general practitioner/surgery.
