Meet our counsellor, Sandra

Profile of counsellor Sandra Lawrence

RN RM DN(Lond) Pg Dip Couns Mclin Sci PGCE

BACP Ac c Snr. Practitioner, BICA Acc Counsellor

Sandra Lawrence is an experienced counsellor for over 27 years in women’s health counselling and independent counselling. She is a qualified nurse and midwife and a PGCE trained teacher. Sandra worked as a nurse and a midwife and recognised a need for counselling in maternity when she worked in the Fetal Abnormality Scanning clinic and cared for patients with pregnancy distress due to abnormality or pregnancy losses. She advanced her career as a women's health counsellor with awards and scholarships. She won the Royal College of Nursing Midwifery Award, before moving on to excel in her field of women’s health counselling in the NHS setting.

Before undergoing her five year training in 2002 at a UKCP approved Masters in Clinical Science Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Course at the University of Kent at Canterbury, Sandra was trained as a counsellor at the University of Hertfordshire. At the University of Hertfordshire, she did the three year BACP approved counselling course for a postgraduate diploma in counselling, winning the University’s prize for outstanding work with bereaved maternity and gynaecology patients in the NHS. Prior to this training, she was trained at the Tavistock Clinic in London, with a short course in perinatal bereavement. She also completed the foundation training in group analysis at the Institute of Group Analysis in London. She has also undergone some related training to help couples in infertility and other settings.

Sandra established a sound counselling service in one of Kent’s large NHS Trust, winning the Semper Trust Midwifery Award for maternity psychological care. She also won the HSA Award twice, allowing her to further her education and training in the field of counselling in women’s health. Her dedication to the service of women’s health counselling, which is now an integral part of healthcare, enabled her to win the Making A Difference Award in 2015. Sandra, alongside a multidisciplinary team, established counselling as a profession in its own right and was forward-thinking enough to introduce telephone and Skype counselling to meet the needs of clients who are too ill to travel or who live too far away to travel for face-to-face counselling. She is works both in person and virtually, and she sees men and women, couples and individuals and is not gender-specific in her counselling work.  She provides implications counselling and support counselling for infertility patients, in line with HFEA regulations, both at TFP Nurture Fertility and as an independent practitioner.

Sandra’s main work is in the NHS, providing specialist maternity, gynaecology and infertility counselling. She also has a small private practice working with other issues not related to healthcare.

Sandra joined TFP Nurture Fertility in June 2019, on a part-time ad hoc basis. She is a Senior Practitioner, accredited by the British Association For Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP). She is also an accredited member of the British Association for Infertility Counselling (BICA). She has voluntarily given up her UKCP and NMC registration to focus more on infertility and women's health counselling. Sandra loves to teach and has written articles for professional journals. She has lectured at Christ Church University in Kent for many years, not only helping to develop their bereavement modules for midwifery students but also teaching on maternity bereavement. She also ran  NHS in-house training for multidisciplinary teams to help them break bad news more effectively and to increase sensitivity in communication. Sandra integrates her model of counselling, client-centred, psychodynamic, psychoanalytic, CBT and solution-focused therapy, along with her healthcare experience, to offer infertility patients a high standard of care.

If you wish to book a counselling session. with Sandra Lawrence, please call the unit on 0115 828 0246.