Counseling is one of the most powerful tools with a long-term impact on both behavior change and psychological nourishment of an individual and the effectiveness of organizations. Counseling basically is talking and sharing with an individual in order to let him or she explore various options at his or her disposal to enable him or her to make an informed decision and helps him or her solves a problem or problems at the end day. It is an exercise that consists of deep thinking, putting the decisions into action, being cautious of human nature & culture, being timely, being sincere, being compassionate, and kind. It should be noted that counseling is an activity that involves more than just telling an individual what to do about his or her problem (Schmidt, 2006).
Counseling Services in Brunei is taken as one of the strategic partners of the countries Civil, education, health, and administrative services. Regarding this importance, counseling has been integrated into several sectors of development in Brunei, such as the Civil Service, the education sector, and the health care services, which play a major role in the nurturing and enrichment of people’s wellbeing and quality of life.
In Brunei, counseling is still a new concept as the country tries to engulf it into its system and integrate it into its development agendas. Hence it still lacks the vital capacity and resources, both human and material, in order to make it have a tangible and effective impact on the life of Brunei people. This situation might be the way it is possible due to the government’s lack of full support of the idea and also the massive resources needed to make it to be a robust thing.
In order to tackle the gap that exists in the quality and efficiency in counseling, especially in the public services, in 2004, by the permission of the Majesty the Sultan, the government decided to show commitment towards raising the quality of public services, and among the strategies to achieve this was that there was supposed to be a well-established counseling scheme that was to be integrated into the human resources management of the government’s corporations especially among civil servants, by increasing productivity, awareness and commitment towards tasks and responsibilities as well as career development (Elvis, 2005).
The fundamentals of the success of such an initiative by the government of Brunei regarding improving the practice and competence of counseling in the country is still too young to be measured or evaluated on whether it has had a massive impact on the civil service sector of Brunei (Kimberly, 2005).
Even though the counseling quality and practice in Brunei is still down, there has been some contribution from the private and nongovernmental organizations to improve the quality and professionalism of counseling services in Brunei. There has been the introduction of counseling and psychology courses in the local training institutes, and also giving refresher courses to the existing counselors in order to enable them to enhance their professionalism and gain new global skills that are necessary to improve the type of counseling services they offer to the people (Levy, 2002).
Several nongovernmental organizations, for example in health care, are working hand in hand with the government to offer counseling services to people who suffer from terminal illnesses such as HIV/AIDS and Diabetes, which has really been a quality and efficient service, but there is need of expanding this services to cater for the whole country and to be of good quality in the way it is offered.
Brunei also has a large percentage of people who are practicing counseling, yet they are not trained or absorbed by the counseling agencies; this lives quality and competency a wanting issue in the way they go about with what they do to the unsuspecting clients. Counseling is a service that requires professionalism in the way it is conducted since there are issues that are sensitive and must be handled with caution, and nonprofessional counselors might be ignorant about this. Hence the counseling quality, competence of the counselors is an issue at hand which should be addressed with immediacy (Edward, 2003).
References
Kimberly, M. (2005) counseling ethics: A question of making the right decision. Annual publication: Sydney, Australia.
Levy, M. (2002) A child’s way: Gaining the floor in parent-teacher talk at the preschool, Childhood and Social Research publishers: Brisbane.
Elvis, J. (2005) Counseling integration in education, University of Brunei publication
Schmidt, S. D. (2006) Ethical concern for counselors and educators, Advance online publication: Alabama.
Edward, J. (2003) Government has to do something about counseling services: Essential Services and Comprehensive Programs Brunei, Bacon publishers.