The challenges and trends that survey participants consider important are described below.
“Counsellors working in schools seem to be, sadly, phasing out. There seems to be a hidden agenda behind this. Counselling psychologists and play therapists are trying to find their way into the education system, which is good, but not at the expense of losing counsellors. Counsellors never had opportunities in the medical hospital – only psychologists work there unfortunately. It is saddening to see that there is still a huge discrepancy between the different helping professions here in Malta. I work in a multi-disciplinary team, and the richness that comes out of these reflective conversations is superb. I feel blessed. Another challenge that locally we encounter is with regard to supervision. There is no consensus with regards to whether counsellors can access supervision from let’s say psychologists or psychotherapists, or whether the qualified supervisor needs to necessarily be a qualified counsellor, even after one gets the warrant.” (vgl. Zammit Genovese, 2020)
“Even though it is a warranted profession, still it is not available in many sectors, eg health department/hospital. Psychology was awarded a warrant after counselling, yet, there is still this social believe that psychology is preferred for some reason or another. Counselling jobs available are not well paid, and not taken care of.” (vgl. Lehtonen, 2020)
“That it needs to be respected more by psychologists and employers like the government and welfare agencies.” (vgl. Zammit, 2020)
“Having been a 'cinderella' profession for a long time & acquiring regulation long after that of psychology it still struggles to reach various entities.
The Covid era has opened a new window in the form of online counselling which was previously hardly practiced here due to the fact that Malta is a small country so distances are short. However traffic jams are very common. Presently Malta has a population of about 440,000 with around 40,000 registered cars on an island measuring 316 km². Clients just calculated the extra time they needed to get to their session according to the traffic congestion at a particular time of day & level of parking difficulty. Now this issue might not be a stumbling block any more. Short courses on Online Counselling have been organised to help in this process.” (vgl. Galea, 2020)