Professionals
How Baby Bank professional referrals work
How Baby Bank professional referrals work
If you’re a health visitor, midwife or worker at another statutory agency or charity looking to refer a client for the first time, please complete the referral form below.
Initial referrals must always come from care professionals and voluntary organisations who are directly supporting an individual or family.
Baby Bank FAQs
Can parents and families self-refer?
Self-referrals can only be made once a family or individual has already been referred to our service by a professional.
After the initial professional referral, they’ll be eligible to re-access the service for two years, or until the child is 2 years old.
If someone completes a self-referral, who hasn’t been referred to the service previously, we’ll let them know to ask their health visitor or support worker to complete this new referral.
What will happen once you make a referral?
Our volunteers will make up the Baby Pack requested and deliver it directly to the family, on one of our twice weekly van deliveries.
We’ll let you know when the pack has been delivered.
We’ll update you if there are any items unavailable and need to be sent in a later delivery.
We aim to deliver Packs within 3 weeks of a referral.
If we have many Newborn Baby Pack requests outstanding, we’ll deliver them in baby due date order, to ensure any babies due imminently get the resources they need in time.
What are the criteria for referrals?
We don’t have set criteria.
If you are working with a family that is struggling to provide baby clothes, toys and equipment for their child under the age of 2 years, we are happy to receive your referral and to help them.
Families who need our help can be facing a variety of adverse circumstances. It could be those living in poverty, temporary accommodation, women and their children who have fled domestic abuse, refugees, asylum seekers, families struggling with physical or mental health issues, or social isolation.
A family could have working parents but still be in a position to require our help.
Our Baby Bank service (including delivery) is free.
What locations do you cover
We can help families and individuals throughout Edinburgh and the Lothians.
How counselling professional referrals work
Our counselling service is open to:
- Adults of all genders
- Living in the Lothians
- Who present with mild to moderate levels of distress
Our Fast Track Service enables quicker access to three sessions of counselling and aims to support clients manage the impact of time-critical situations such as:
- Making a decision about continuing with a pregnancy. Our only agenda is to support clients to explore what is right for them.
- Clients who know they are about to lose a pregnancy
- Immediately after loss (miscarriage or baby loss)
- Experiencing significant emotional difficulties in 3rd trimester (28 weeks + development) or 4th trimester (first 3 months after birth)
Current waiting time: 2-3 weeks.
We invite clients to make an affordable contribution towards each counselling session, if they are able. For more information on contributing please see here.
Our Long Term Service is open to clients who are affected by fertility issues, baby loss, pregnancy, birth or parenting.
We invite clients to make an affordable contribution towards each counselling session, if they are able. For more information on contributing please see here.
As we provide only ten sessions in the Long Term Service, we are not able to work with clients with complex trauma, clients presenting with heightened trauma symptoms or those with a severe level of distress.
Our team is made up of senior counsellors, qualified volunteers and trainee counsellors in their later stages of training.
We offer weekday appointments in the daytime and evening.
Counselling is offered online and in person at 1 Lochside View, Edinburgh, EH12 9DH, next to the Gyle Shopping Centre tram stop.
Current waiting time: approximately 8 weeks from assessment appointment.
Referring clients
Our preferred way to take referrals is directly from potential clients using the form below.
However, if it is not possible for a client to do this, we do accept referrals from professionals if clients have given explicit consent to all of the following details being shared.
If you would like to make a referral on behalf of someone, please complete the referral form below.
You will need the following information from any potential client:
- Their explicit consent to share the following information
- Their name
- Their email address and / or phone number (email is our preferred method of contact)
- A brief description of the reason for their referral
- How best to contact them
- Your name
- Your email address
- Your role
If due to internal procedures you are unable to use the above form, please email our Counselling Lead at counselling@
counsellingandcare.co.uk
explaining that you would like to make a referral. Please provide your phone number and the times you are available, we will arrange a time to speak on the phone.
Please note once a referral has been made we are not able to liaise with Health Professionals about the progress of that referral until we have gained consent from clients to do so.
Receive referral
Contact client
Usually by email (but we can phone if there are barriers to using email) to offer next steps and paperwork
Arrange initial assessment
Once paperwork complete, arrange online initial assessment appointment
Client added to waiting list referral
If agreed, client then added to waiting list and contacted by our Counselling Lead when a space becomes available.
