The Department of Health has been urged to agree minimum standards for all providers of counselling services amid doctors' concerns that unqualified personnel can do more harm than good.
At this month's meeting of the Eastern Health Board, it was agreed to ask the Department to consider the establishment of a national register for counsellors after members expressed fears that anyone could set themselves up as a counsellor.
Proposing registration of all those working in the field, Dr James Reilly said a lot of modern illnesses were associated with stress. A very important adjunct to treatment in these cases was counselling, but a GP had no way of knowing whether the counsellor they were referring a patient to was adequately qualified, he said.
"I feel very unhappy about referring people for counselling when there are no agreed standards," he said.
He said psychological services in the general medical services area were very limited and a patient could be waiting for treatment for "months to years". The gap was being filled by private counsellors.
"There needs to be wide consultation within the professions to define what basic qualification one has to have to call themselves a counsellor. Then doctors can refer with confidence," Dr Reilly added. He stressed the danger of unqualified counsellors giving advice that could make a patient worse.
There was also a danger, in the absence of regulations, of people charging a professional fee for a service they were not competent to offer, he said.
The EHB's vice-chairman, Dr Philip O'Connell, said later that regulations were needed to protect the public. "I am concerned that there are many calling themselves counsellors who may have done nothing more than a weekend correspondence course," he added.
"In the course of any day in general practice, a significant proportion of work will relate to social and emotional problems and while the majority is dealt with in-house, the need for counselling is very clear . . . "We want to ensure any secondary referral source will provide a quality service and not make the situation worse."