ContactPsychological and Social Welfare Specialist Training Course Completed (Feedback from participants)
The training course for people interested in psychological counseling and social welfare support for donor link (total 4 modules from to July) was successfully completed. Every module had about 25 participants including not only counselors and social workers, but also doctors, researchers, and other people interested in support for donor link. We would like to share some of the feedback.
Many people commented that they learned many important things through the lectures by Dr. Thorn and Dr. Astrid who have actually been involved in donor linking. For example, the support for donor linking needs to be continuous, from before the donor link starts, while waiting for the matching, and after the matching. At each of these stages, it is important to provide psychological and social welfare support to the parties involved. Moreover, several people commented that they noticed that the support must be changed based on the clients’ position such as donor-conceived individual, donor or parent of donor-conceived child, age, and family relationships. They also learned that it is important to support not only the individuals who want to discover their donor or half siblings but also those around them.
Due to the time difference between and Europe and Japan, we scheduled the start time of all training modules at 7:00 pm in Japan on weekdays. But for many participants, 7:00p.m. was inconvenient to attend the training because they usually are on their way home and are not at work or at home around that time.
Some participants also said that they could not concentrate for two hours if the sessions were only lectures, so I thought it was necessary to incorporate more group discussions, as we did at the end of the session. There were also comments thatmore time for Q&A was needed. We will keep such opinions in mind for future events.
Many participants commented that they appreciated the training, which focused on a topic that had not been covered in Japan before.
