Counselling and Diabetes Education

Get Counselling

Please make sure you read our disclaimer and privacy statement before starting. This is very important so you understand what happens to your information, your privacy and your rights and responsibilities. There are a lot of details here about how our online counselling works and what to expect.

Please read all of this and then complete this form and click submit.

Counselling Request Form

It will be sent to Diabetes Counselling Online Inc. head office where our Director will decide who will be best suited as your Counsellor, Diabetes Educator and/or Dietitian.

Our Diabetes Counselling and Education Team

Diabetes Counselling Online has a team of qualified health care professionals. This includes a psychologist, mental health social worker, counsellor, diabetes educators and a dietitian. Most of these people also live with diabetes themselves and/or have many years experience working in diabetes care. We therefore bring an understanding of life with diabetes to our work.

While our focus is on counselling and mental health, we also offer general advice regarding diabetes management.

Our team can not make changes to your individual diabetes management but we can work with you to develop plans for how you can address this with your usual health care team.
We offer short term e-counselling and e-consults primarily via email. We can also offer telephone and/or Skype sessions in some cases. At present this may be an addition to your e-counselling or education and can be negotiated with your counsellor or other team member, once you get started.

Often counselling and education occur at the same time as issues can be related to both mental health wellbeing and diabetes management. We will decide the best person to work with you based on your needs and the experience and skills across our team.

What happens in Online Counselling?

With on-line diabetes counselling and education:

• You can bring up anything that is a concern to you
• At your own pace, we will try to help you to work out what the problems are and how you may tackle them
• It can sometimes be helpful just to talk to someone about your concerns
• You can create new ways of thinking about your life living with diabetes and your “life story”.

Amount of e-counselling and education

As we are a not-for-profit charity with limited funding and high demand for services, we need some guidelines as to how long we can provide individual counselling and education. This has been set at up to 6 hours worth of time.

One session is considered to be an email from you and a reply from us. Some of these “sessions” might be very short, others might take an hour or so. In this way some people might have many emails and some, only a few.

Most people find this is enough time to deal with the issues, along with using the other areas of the service. If you have any concerns about this, please let us know and we can chat about it. We will keep an eye on how long we are spending each time we email you.

Online Counselling via email is different to face to face counselling. You do not have the eye contact and visual cues that occur in a face to face session. It is not for everyone but many people find it very helpful.

Writing is an excellent way of communicating and has positive and negative aspects, just like in any other situation. One fantastic thing is the ability for both you and the counsellor to consider responses to questions. You can take your time to think about what you want to say and go back and edit this before you send the email. Of course you can also reply from your own home at any time that suits you.

Communicating with our team via our community areas, such as our forums and chat sessions and on our Facebook groups, gives you additional ways to seek support. Very importantly you can also make connections with other people living with diabetes in these places and build your support network.

We will guide you in the e-counselling and e-diabetes education process and will pace our communication to your personal style. Never feel that you have to write in a certain way, or even spell correctly! You can write a little, or a lot – it is whatever works for you.

Emergency or Crisis

If you are concerned about your immediate health, feel unwell, or worried about your safety or wellbeing, you need to attend your local doctor or emergency department or call one of the emergency numbers listed below.

Online counselling may not be suitable for you if you require an immediate response to your situation and it may be better to seek counselling via a 24 hour crisis line listed at the end of this page, or seek help from your local doctor for referral to a counsellor.

Please also bear in mind again, we can not provide individual advice regarding changes to your diabetes management.

How do I start?

Please make sure you read our disclaimer and privacy statement before starting. This is very important so you understand what happens to your information, your privacy and your rights and responsibilities.

Please then complete the Counselling Request Form and click submit.

It will be sent to Diabetes Counselling Online Inc. head office where our Director will decide who will be best suited as your Counsellor, Diabetes Educator and/or Dietitian.

Please include as much or as little information as you like. Some areas of the form are mandatory – this is for our record keeping so we can give you the best service possible and statistics which assist us in seeking funding.

Drop us a line directly on [email protected] if you have any problems with the form.

Outside of Australia?

If you are living outside of Australia it is at the discretion of our service director as to whether we can offer you e-counselling and education services. As medical and health systems may vary from country to country we may not have knowledge of how resources and access to services. We may provide this service to you on a case by case basis but given our funding is currently from the Australian government we must charge a fee for Overseas clients.

This is currently set at AUD $70 per e-consult session which generally takes our counsellors around an hour each consult, or you can prepay for the standard 6 hours worth of e-counselling/education at a rate of AUD $290 (valued at $400). Please and pay via our online store and then complete the online counselling form here, adding your name and letting us know that you have made payment.

What happens next?

Once we have looked at your form, we will respond to you via email. Each time you email us we will aim to reply within 5 business days however sometimes this can be much quicker, or it may be longer. Please be patient as we are a small charitable organisation, but we will always get back to you. This will usually include questions about your situation and the problems, so that we can get to know more about you and what you are dealing with.

It may also include some ideas about how many sessions or conversations we may have and how this may happen. This is a way to clarify how we agree to work together. It can be re-negotiated at any time, and we welcome your ideas about how you want to use the service and what you are getting out of it. This is all about you!

Under 14 years of age?

If you are under 14 years of age, we will ask you about whether you are ok for us to contact your parents as part of our counselling. It is important that we make sure you are safe and that your parents are involved in counselling if appropriate. We will not make contact with them without chatting with you about this first.

Notification of risk

If we have any concerns about any person under 18 being unsafe or at risk of any abuse of any kind we will always report this to the appropriate child protection authorities in the relevant state.

Waiting time

During the time you use this service, each time you e-mail us, we will try to respond to you within 5 business days. This will vary from counsellor to counsellor depending on workload and other factors. You can respond to us when it suits you. At times you may experience delays due to our workload and when we are away from the office for training and leave, but we will always advise you about these times.

How much contact can I expect?

As a not-for-profit organisation with limited funding and high demands for services, we do have some guidelines as to how long we can work with you. For the purpose of this service, a “session” is 1 message from you and a return message from us.

It may be that you only want or need 1 session and this may be enough for you. However, it is likely that we will need at least a couple of sessions.

We can generally provide up to 6 hours worth of counselling or diabetes education time with you.

For some people this might equate to many shorter emails, for others, it might be just a few, with each being a longer and more complex conversation.

Usually after this point, we will need to refer you on elsewhere. However, again, we will discuss this with you as we go.

It is up to you how long there is between our sessions – sometimes this is a short as a day, or as long as many months. You may finish with our service and then find you need to come back at some stage down the track. This is totally fine and you can use the Personal Details form again, or contact us directly on [email protected]

Other services

It it helpful for us to have details of your usual doctor or someone in your health care team. It makes it possible for us to contact them should we need to, with your permission. You are not required to share this with us however. You can discuss this with your counsellor or diabetes educator.

We might agree that you need to look for other avenues for support at the end of our contact or even some time during our sessions. Many people find that they are able to resolve their concerns during our contacts, whilst others find they would like to seek some face to face support once we finish.

If we decide that it would be helpful for you to continue with counselling, or seek face to face support around your diabetes management you need to speak with your local doctor, diabetes educator, or medical centre about where you can go for more help. We will try to refer you to a face-face counsellor or other service where we can, but as this is a National service, this is often very difficult for us to do.

You can also look at the resources and links to see if there is a service you can go to.

Emergency Help