University Clinic

As part of the Office for Students-funded Student Mental Health Partnerships project, UCL and the University of Sheffield have set up University Clinics: services which improve access to high quality, evidence-based mental health treatment for students and staff.

University Clinics are mental health services which are attached to university clinical psychology departments. Within these clinics, evidence-based treatment is provided by clinical academic staff and trainee practitioners under close supervision, and new cutting edge treatments are developed and tested. A mainstay of clinical psychology training and practice in other parts of the world, especially the US and Australia, University Clinics are rare in the UK because of the NHS’s provision of mental health services. However, where such clinics do exist in the UK, they are recognised as providing extremely high-quality care.

There are a number of advantages to the University Clinic model. Evidence-based treatment for certain issues may not be available through university or standard NHS services, but specialist University Clinics can provide a broader range of treatments (e.g. for people on the autism spectrum). A number of students will fall between the gaps of NHS primary and secondary care, and University Clinics can help bridge that gap (e.g. for students with eating disorders, or emotional dysregulation). For trainees, University Clinics provide a high quality training environment, and for researchers they provide the opportunity to develop new treatments.

UCL has the largest Clinical Psychology training course in the UK, trains Psychological Wellbeing Practitioners for London and CBT practitioners for large areas of England. Our University Clinic is NHS-based, with specialist satellite clinics linked with established NHS clinics. The University of Sheffield University Clinic is based in the Counselling Service and so has a different model. However, both clinics are a collaboration between practitioners and the academic clinical psychology department, and we are learning from each other as we develop these models. UCL and the Univeristy of Sheffield are now working with other universities, to explore the expansion of this model.

Read a blog post about the UCL and University of Sheffield University Clinics on the Office for Students website.