Swin-eCounselling Terms and Conditions

Procrastination Please read the following terms and conditions before submitting your question.

Purpose
Disclosure of Information
Publishing Frequently Asked Questions
Complaints Procedure

See also Swin-eCounselling Frequently Asked Questions for further information about how the Swin-eCounselling service works.

Purpose

The Swin-eCounselling service is designed to provide you, students at Swinburne University, with support and advice about issues that may be affecting your study or private wellbeing, via an online question and answer system. Posting a message to the Swin-eCounselling service will allow you to ask questions, which, forever reason, you may not feel comfortable asking someone face-to-face.

Swin-eCounselling is not intended to replace therapeutic face-to-face counselling of an ongoing nature. Its purpose is instead to help you with day-to-day concerns you may be experiencing, and/or to establish whether you may benefit from seeing a counsellor or another health professional to help overcome your difficulties. For ongoing or more serious issues, face-to-face counselling or psychotherapy is advised.

The Swin-eCounselling service is run collaboratively by staff at the Swinburne Psychology Clinic, the Swinburne Psychology discipline (Faculty of Life and Social Sciences) and Student Development and Counselling (Student Services). Submitted Swin-eCounselling questions will be responded to by postgraduate students in Masters and Doctoral programs in Counselling, Clinical and Health Psychology with the assistance of fully-qualified counsellors from Student Development and Counselling. Many of these postgraduate students are already registered Psychologists, and all work is supervised by experienced, registered psychological practitioners who have been associated with the University for many years. If you would like further information about the qualifications of the Swin-eCounselling staff please contact swin-ecounselling@swin.edu.au.

The intention of this service is to enhance the services already offered by the Swinburne Psychology Clinic and Student Development and Counselling to Swinburne University students in Higher Education and TAFE. Swin-eCounselling further provides the opportunity for the Graduate Psychology students to assist in delivering a service, and to evaluate its effectiveness, thereby increasing their preparation for the workforce. Swin-eCounselling is an initiative already being provided by a number of Universities and community agencies. It has proven to be an effective means of delivering psychological advice and education.

It is important to recognise that there can be limitations to online counselling. In many situations face-to-face counselling is safer and may be more effective in addressing emotional and psychological issues. Some limitations associated with online counselling include: misunderstandings, which can arise due to a lack of non-verbal cues (such as facial expressions and emotional reactions); email messages may not be received, or can be delayed; and we cannot ensure the privacy of emails at your end. Confidentiality is also limited by the security of the technology being used, and while all effort is taken to ensure this is minimised it may not be guaranteed. See Disclosure of Information for further explanation of the risks to confidentiality associated with online counselling.

The Swin-eCounselling service is provided solely for students of Swinburne University of Technology and TAFE. Questions originating from a non-Swinburne email account will not be responded to by the Swin-eCounselling service. If you are not a Swinburne University student, the organisations listed in our resources section may be helpful in answering your question(s).

Disclosure of Information

The online Swin-eCounselling question form has been designed with privacy and confidentiality in mind. Once the form is submitted, all information within the form (including your email address) will be emailed to a Swin-eCounsellor. Only those with the authority to answer the questions are permitted to access these emails and read your question. For the purposes of good practice and to ensure a high quality of service, your questions, and the accompanying responses will be stored separately from the email program, with password-only access to these records. Due to quality assurance, and training requirements, Swin-eCounsellors may discuss your question with their Supervisor. All Supervisors are fully qualified Psychologists or Counsellors. This will again be discussed in strict confidence and is intended as a measure of ensuring you receive the most helpful and accurate reply possible. Any record of these discussions will be stored securely together with your email and response.

Swin-eCounselling questions are sent via a secure email form to a Swin-eCounsellor. In order to receive an answer to your submitted question, a valid student email address must be provided. While this means your email address will be viewable by the Swin-eCounsellor answering your question, this typically only identifies your student number and not your name. Swin-eCounsellors will not attempt to match your student number to your name, except in the rare instance that he/she has a strong suspicion that you are at risk of causing serious harm to yourself or someone else.

Due to illegal hacking and the potential for technological mishaps, the risk of unintended disclosure of student-counsellor correspondence may be greater for an online counselling service than in face-to-face situations. Any communication on the internet has the potential to be intercepted, however steps have been taken to minimise this risk at our end. While all care is taken to ensure emails coming into the Swin-eCounselling service are accessed only by authorised staff and all records are kept secure, students submitting a question, and therefore receiving a response, are responsible for the confidentiality and security of those emails at their end. It is therefore recommended that you ensure you have up-to-date virus protection and anti-spyware software on your computer when using the Swin-eCounselling service.

Under specific circumstances, information may be disclosed to a third party in order to avert risk. Legal compliance requires that if the responding counsellor is concerned about the safety of a student, or others, then confidentiality may be broken. In such situations, only minimal information necessary to avert risk will be disclosed, and attempts will be made to first discuss this with the student. In addition, records may be subpoenaed for court in exceptional circumstances. Under no other circumstances will the confidentiality of students' personal records be broken. Students are also able to request to view the personal information in these records. Please refer to http://www.swinburne.edu.au/privacy.htm for more information on Swinburne's Privacy Policy.

Publishing Frequently Asked Questions

Should we discover that a submitted question is one asked frequently by Swinburne students, we may consider it helpful to publish the question, and the accompanying response, in the Swin-eCounselling FAQ section. This will only occur where you have expressed permission in the submitted question form to publish your question. If the question is to be published, any identifying information, such as your email address, name or any identifying specifics of your situation (such as course details etc.) will be removed first, and the response will be directed towards all Swinburne students. Note that in this case, you will still receive an individualised response sent to your email account, and will be notified of our intention to publish the question as an FAQ.

Complaints Procedure

The Swin-eCounselling service is grateful for any constructive feedback, as this will help us to ensure we are meeting students needs as best as possible. Please feel free to send your feedback to swin-ecounselling@swin.edu.au.

If you wish to make a complaint against the Swin-eCounselling service or a Swin-eCounsellor, please direct your concerns in the first instance to swin-ecounselling@swin.edu.au and we will do our best to resolve these issues for you. As with all Swin-eCounselling emails, these concerns will be kept in strict confidence. Should you be concerned about submitting your complaint directly to the Swin-eCounselling service, alternatively you can contact the Manager, Student Development and Counselling on 9214 6734.