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Professional boundaries – Clients

One of Suitsme’s values is human connection. We believe that support works best when you (as well as your family, carers and any other people who are important to you) have a strong, meaningful relationship with your workers.

There are many different types of relationships; friendship, romantic, transactional, clinical to name a few. Having lots of different relationships helps us to live a full, rich life, but we need the right relationships with the right people.

For example, you may have a great romantic relationship with your spouse, but it would be confusing if you also had that relationship with your doctor.

The appropriate relationship for you to have with your worker is a professional relationship. Here we’ll explain why this is important to us and let you know what you can do to help.

We also give workers guidance on what they need to do to maintain a professional relationship with you. You can read about it in this document; Professional boundaries guide for workers.

There are two really important things you can do to help keep your relationships with your worker professional:

1. Always use the app to contact and book workers. If there is no booking in the app then your worker should not be with you.
2. Outside of sessions, only communicate with staff to arrange logistics (e.g. bring running shoes or meet me at the café)

Friend Vs Worker

You and your worker should get along really well and sometimes it might feel like a friendship. One big difference between your relationship with your worker and a friendship is that your worker is being paid to be with you. Friends spend time together because both people get mutual enjoyment out of it, not because one of them is getting paid to be there.

If making friends is something you want to work on, your worker can help you with that. Some ways they can do this is by connecting you with a local club or coming along to meetup events with you. If a worker acts as your friend it is demotivating for you to make natural friendships and if that worker leaves Suitsme, you are back where you started.

Support from Friends and Family

When you are browsing for workers, you may see people you know such as family members or friends. We ask that you please don’t book with these people. This is because friends and family have a natural, pre-existing role in your life. When they spend time with you and help you out, it is because they care about you and you are important to them; not because they are getting paid. We don’t want to complicate or alter pre-existing relationships by adding a new set of rules.