About Us
At Wandsworth Bereavement Service, we have been supporting bereaved residents of Wandsworth for over two decades with confidential bereavement counselling sessions. Here people may explore and address their bereavement experiences in a safe and therapeutic environment.
We are an independent charity and are proud to have been selected as one of the mayor’s charities of the year 2022/23.
At WBS, we value and believe in:
the individual’s capacity to work through the pain of grief.
‘normalising’ the grief process.
the individual’s belief system and life experiences.
the importance of ethnic and cultural traditions and influences in the grieving process.
working with ‘difference’ to ensure equality and enable the individual to access and work through personal grief in a meaningful and therapeutically beneficial way.
the possibility of reaching a peaceful understanding of loss.
About our Counsellors
Our counselling team includes both fully qualified bereavement counsellors and counsellors undertaking professional counselling training. This established model has been an important part of our service for many years and is widely used across the counselling sector.
Counsellors in training are adults with a wide range of life and professional experience who are completing the practical client hours required as part of their recognised counselling qualification. They are not working alone: they receive regular, specialist supervision from our experienced in-house supervisory team, alongside the support provided through their training.
All our counsellors are trained in bereavement counselling and work within the ethical framework of the BACP (British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy). Our team includes people of different ages, genders and backgrounds. We will always try to take account of any preferences or needs you may have, although allocation will sometimes depend on availability.
We are passionate about providing a high-quality, compassionate and strictly confidential service to everyone who comes to Wandsworth Bereavement Service.
At Wandsworth Bereavement Service we are passionate about our work and the service we provide to our clients is strictly confidential.
Our counselling process
When you first contact the Service, we will arrange for you to come for an initial assessment session to discuss your bereavement and how it is affecting you. This session will take place during office hours and will last for approximately an hour.
Then, if it is agreed that counselling may be helpful for you, a counsellor will be allocated to you for one-to-one counselling. The sessions, which last for 50 minutes, take place on a regular weekly basis, at the same time each week, for a total of up to 12 sessions. For ongoing counselling, we can offer either daytime or evening sessions, Monday to Friday, depending on what suits you best. There will be a waiting time between the initial appointment and the start of the regular sessions.
The sessions all take place at the Service on Lavender Hill although home or remote counselling (including the initial assessment session) can be offered to anyone with restricted mobility as our building requires access via steps.
Low-cost fees based on a sliding scale (based on salary) may apply, where appropriate. Fees are not charged at all for anyone who is referred to the service by their GP, nor are they charged for the Children and Young Peoples Services.
Please contact us if you wish to discuss this in more detail.
We thank Power Diary for donating their client management system to us and thereby supporting our administrative staff in making the allocation processes as efficient as possible.