Dr Rhian Vaughan, MA, PhD

Dr Rhian Vaughan carries a caseload of eleven to fourteen people at a time, which is the first thing worth knowing about her, because it is roughly what a music therapy caseload looks like and it is a long way from the impression given by a two minute video. Her work is split across an older people’s mental health service, an inpatient stroke unit and a small amount of private practice, and a typical course of sessions with one person runs for months rather than weeks. She is registered with the Health and Care Professions Council, which in the UK is a legal requirement for anyone using the title music therapist, and she holds an MA in music therapy and a PhD.

On this site she is the reviewer who holds the writing to the register. That means three particular things. First, that the site describes what a registered arts therapist actually does, including the parts that are unglamorous: assessment, goal setting, notes, supervision, multidisciplinary meetings, and the discharge conversation. Second, that the boundaries between modalities are drawn where they really fall, so music therapy is not quietly credited with what a dance movement psychotherapist does, and neither of them is confused with a community singing group or an activities coordinator. Third, that no description of a session on this site is invented. If a page says a session might open a certain way, she has either seen it open that way or the sentence has come out.

She reads the clinical claims against HCPC standards of proficiency, the professional frameworks published by the British Association for Music Therapy, and the trial and review literature, and she is the person who insists that “a therapist would typically” is only written where it is true across the profession rather than true of her own practice.

There is one thing she will not do, and it is worth stating on her own page rather than burying it in a policy. She does not comment on a named person she has not met. Not in a session note read out to her, not in a description of somebody’s father in the forum, not in a message asking whether a particular therapist is any good. A registered therapist assessing someone she has never seen would be practising badly, and no amount of detail in the question changes that. What she can do is describe how the work is meant to be done, which is what the rest of this site is for.