Clinician
Prior to your appointments, please check with the clinic about your clinician’s name. You can read about your clinician on our website or send us an email to ask any question that you wish. You can always contact us and change your clinician if you need to.
Terms and Condition
Below are some important information that you would need to know before commencing therapy. Please read these carefully and let us or your clinician know if you have any questions.
Fees
Our clinicians both generally registered and provisionally registered are all highly experienced psychologists. Our charges are as below.
Dr Amelia Shay: Fees are $320 for an initial session and $250 for all following individual appointments (potential Medicare rebate: $89.65). Couple or family sessions are charged at $280 (no Medicare rebate applicable).
Dr Kaya Beinke: Fees are $320 for an initial session and $280 for all following individual appointments (potential Medicare rebate: $131.65). Couple or family sessions are charged at $280 (no Medicare rebate applicable).
Appointments outside of a clinician’s usual schedule are charged at $320.
Provisionally registered psychologists: Initial appointment is $240 and any subsequent appointment will be $150 during the week and $200 on a weekend (no Medicare rebate available when seeing a Provisionally registered psychologist).
Each session is 50 minutes long.
Please note that assessments are charged separately, please discuss the fees before agreeing to participate in any assessment.
Medicare rebate
A Medicare rebate can be obtained for certain number of sessions if you bring a current Mental Health Care Plan from your GP. If you don’t use Medicare, you might also be able to use your private health insurer support, but you need to check with them as each insurer has their own policy. Please note that as per Medicare’s policy, you can either use Medicare, or private health insurance and not both.
Medicare does not pay any rebate for couple and family sessions. There will be no Medicare rebate for a session with a provisionally registered psychologist.
NDIS Fees
NDIS supported clients are charged $214 per session when seeing a provisionally registered psychologist. Fees for appointments on Saturdays are $250. To see Dr Amelia or Dr Kaya, fees will be as per the schedule outlined above.
Reports, letters and other tasks
There are charges involved for tasks including reading and responding to emails longer than 150 words, writing letters and reports, and speaking to other stakeholders such as schools and other professionals. Such tasks will be charged pro-rate based on our hourly rate. Usually, a short letter of 1 to 2 pages takes half an hour and a letter of 2 to 3 pages will take an hour. If you wish any of these services, please discuss with your clinician so that they can book a time in their diary to attend to your request.
Cancellation Policy
To cancel or change your appointment, we require at least 2 business days’ notice (48 hours), excluding weekends (our emails are not monitored on the weekends and emails or messages on the weekend will only be attended to on a Monday). Cancellations or change of appointments with less than 2 business days’ notice will incur full charges.
Confidentiality
Confidentiality is an important part of our job, and we take it very seriously. It means that what happens during our sessions will be kept confidential and will not be revealed to other persons or agencies without your written consent. The only times we are obliged to provide information would be when mandated by State and Federal statutes or by court order. Your clinician is also professionally bound to inform relevant parties about your situation and to take measures to protect your welfare, and/or the immediate welfare of others, where your or their safety is threatened.
Couples' confidentiality
If you come to us as a part of couple therapy, for most sessions you will be together with your partner. If you come alone, next time that your clinician sees your partner they will give them a general summary of what has been discussed when they were not there. However, if you would like to share something confidentially with your clinician you can, but please let them know so that they do not bring that up in front of your partner. Having said this, please note that your clinician would not like to keep secrets from your partner as this might be counterproductive to therapy. Our job is to help you both to improve your relationship, so you don’t need to keep secrets from each other.
Please do not hesitate to ask me either before or during our session(s) if you have any questions regarding confidentiality.
Children’s confidentiality – Important read for separated parents
The confidentiality for information that children share during their sessions is more complicated. This depends on the age of the child and presentation of their problems. Your clinician will share this with you in your first or second session.
What you will need to know as parents is that, unless otherwise stated by a court order, both parents have equal rights to seek information about their child’s sessions with a therapist, regardless of who is bringing the child to therapy or who is paying for the service. This means that your clinician will need to also contact the non-accompanying parent and keep them informed of important summaries regarding your child, and the session times and dates. Either of the parents might seek the clinician’s notes at any time, until your child is of a legal age. If a court order is in place, please send us a copy of the court order so that we can decide our responsibilities.
Matters related to child custody or other court proceedings
Please note that we do not provide court assessments or recommendations useful to court. In situations where your goals are to seek recommendations regarding the child’s custody or the family’s conditions that you can provide to the court later, your clinician might decide to discontinue seeing your child and suggest that you seek other professionals. We do not speak to family court consultants, and do not provide recommendations.
Record Keeping
We are required to keep appropriate records of the clients who seek a service from us and your session with your clinician. These records are brief and contain information about your contact details, appointment and billing history, reasons for presenting, what you talk about/do in the sessions, any reports or documents we have received about you from other service providers, and assessments of your progress during therapy. The records are kept online on a secure professional practice database for allied health professionals. Currently we don't keep paper copies on file. Please let us know if you have any questions about our record keeping. While these records are confidential, they can be sought by court or insurance companies (with legal requests) later. Please note that any record might put you at some risk. Make sure you ask your clinician any question regarding records, to become familiar with your rights.
Please note that if you are coming to see your clinician under a Mental Health Care Plan referral then they are required by Medicare to send a report back to the referring medical practitioner giving brief details of your contact with our service, the nature of the therapy undertaken, and your progress in relation to the plan.
Limits of Service
We cannot provide court reports
We are unable to provide court-related assessments or reports, or to give legal testimony unless under subpoena. Where a subpoena does require a report or attendance at court and other legal proceedings, the time taken to perform these duties will be charged at our standard hourly rate.
We are unable to provide emergency assistance
We are also unable to provide emergency assistance should you experience urgent care. We will endeavour to respond to your phone and email messages as soon as we can, but this will not always be immediately, and may be up to a few business-days later.
If you are in immediate and/or urgent emergency circumstances, please dial triple zero emergency ‘000’.
Other services include:
- Lifeline (13 11 14)
- DV Connect (1800 811 811)
- Mensline (1300 78 99 78)
- Kids Helpline (1800 55 1800).