Terms of service

These terms cover the counselling, therapy and coaching services provided by Promise Igba ABN 22 659 184 064, trading as The Listening Room. Promise Igba is an individual sole trader, and he is the person you are contracting with.

The Listening Room is the name the practice trades under.

If something in these terms does not work for you, raise it before your first session rather than after.

Submitting an intake form does not create an appointment and does not commit you to anything. It starts a conversation.

A booking exists once Promise has confirmed a specific time with you and you have accepted these terms.

You accept them by ticking the acceptance box at intake. That box is never pre-ticked. The version you accepted and the time you accepted it are recorded, so it is always clear which terms applied to you.

This is version 2026-08-18.2, last updated 18 August 2026.

Sessions are provided by Promise Igba, a qualified social worker who holds a Master of Social Work and is a member of the Australian Association of Social Workers, membership number 681279, practising under the AASW Code of Ethics.

He is not registered with AHPRA and is not a medical practitioner. He does not prescribe medication, provide medical treatment, or produce diagnoses for legal or insurance purposes.

Services are privately funded. Medicare rebates are not available, and no private health benefit is guaranteed.

Therapy is professional, considered work on what you bring. Coaching is a different thing: forward looking, working on goals and follow through.

If what you need is one and you have booked the other, you will be told. If your needs fall outside what can safely be offered here, Promise will say so and help you find a more appropriate service. That is a professional obligation, not a judgement.

No particular outcome is promised, because no honest practitioner can promise one. That is not a limitation on the care and skill with which the work is done, which is owed to you and is not reduced by anything in these terms.

Before starting, Promise will explain how he works, what sessions involve, the foreseeable risks and limits, the limits of confidentiality, and what the alternatives are. You can ask anything at any point.

You take part voluntarily. You can withdraw consent at any time, including part way through a session, without giving a reason.

Therapy can be uncomfortable. Talking about difficult material sometimes brings up distress between sessions. That is a normal part of the work, and something to raise rather than sit with alone.

You must be physically located in Australia during a session. That is a condition of the professional indemnity cover the practice holds, and of Promise being permitted to provide services where you are.

For online sessions you will be asked to confirm where you are at the start of each one.

Current fees are published on the pricing page and are payable per session. The practice is not registered for GST, so no GST applies and the published figure is the full amount.

Services are privately funded. Medicare rebates are not available. Eligibility for any private health benefit depends entirely on the client’s fund, policy and the practitioner’s recognised provider status. The Listening Room does not guarantee that a rebate will be available. Clients should obtain written confirmation from their fund before booking.

Payment arrangements are confirmed with you directly when your booking is made. Payment is due at or before the session unless something else has been agreed with you in writing. Where fees remain unpaid, further sessions may be paused until the account is settled, after Promise has raised it with you first.

Fees can change, but never retrospectively. A change is notified to you before it applies, and does not affect a session already booked at the earlier fee.

Please give at least 48 hours notice to change or cancel a session.

Where less than 48 hours notice is given, or an appointment is missed, a late cancellation fee of up to the session rate may be charged. It is discretionary, not automatic, and it is not a penalty: it covers a scheduling slot that cannot realistically be offered to someone else at short notice.

If the appointment time is filled by someone else, no cancellation fee applies at all.

The fee is reduced or waived where the circumstances were genuinely unavoidable, including illness, an emergency, caring responsibilities or a crisis. You will not be asked to prove it or to explain more than you want to.

Nothing in this clause affects any right or remedy you have under the Australian Consumer Law.

A session normally ends at its scheduled finish time, because the time was reserved for you, and the full agreed fee may remain payable.

Where the schedule allows, Promise may extend the session to make up some of the time. He is not obliged to, and it depends on who is booked after you.

As with cancellations, discretion is applied where the circumstances were genuinely unavoidable, and nothing here affects your rights under the Australian Consumer Law.

No cancellation fee ever applies when Promise cancels. He will offer you the earliest reasonable alternative time.

If a session is cut short by a failure at his end, including a technology failure on his side, you are not charged for the part that was not delivered. You will be offered a rescheduled session, a credit or a refund of the undelivered portion, whichever suits you.

Email and messages are checked during working hours, not continuously. You can expect a reply by your preferred contact method within 24 to 48 hours.

Between session contact is for scheduling and brief practical matters. It is not a channel for therapy and it is not a channel for urgent support. It is not monitored overnight or on weekends.

If something cannot wait, use the crisis contacts in these terms rather than email.

You are responsible for being somewhere private enough to speak freely, and for having a connection good enough to hold a conversation. Being in a private space protects your confidentiality more than anyone else’s.

At the start of every online session you will be asked to confirm where you currently are. This is not administrative. If something goes wrong during a session, knowing your location is what makes it possible to get help to you.

Sessions are delivered through a third party telehealth provider, which processes the technical information needed to connect and run the session. No claim is made here about that provider’s internal security arrangements beyond what has been verified.

If the connection drops, Promise will attempt to reconnect and, failing that, will call you if you have agreed he can.

Online work has limits. It is harder to respond to acute distress remotely than in the room, which is why the eligibility and emergency contact arrangements in these terms exist.

You will be asked at intake to nominate an emergency contact, and to consent to that person being contacted in the limited circumstances below.

Your emergency contact does not receive routine clinical information, and nominating someone does not give them access to your records or authority to make decisions for you.

They may be contacted where it is reasonably necessary to address a serious concern about your safety, or where contacting them is otherwise required or authorised by law.

You can change or remove your emergency contact at any time by telling Promise.

Neither you nor Promise records a session, by audio, video, transcript or automated note taking tool, unless everyone in the session has expressly agreed in advance.

The practice does not use AI transcription, automated note summarisation, automated triage, or automated decision making about your care. None of those tools is authorised.

If the practice ever proposes to introduce one, it does not happen quietly. A privacy assessment, a review of the vendor, an update to the privacy policy and appropriate notice or consent all come first.

What you say in session is confidential. It is not shared with anyone without your consent, except in the situations below, which are narrow and are explained to you before they could ever matter.

Where there is a serious and imminent risk to your life, health or safety, or to someone else, and disclosure is necessary to lessen or prevent that risk.

Where another Australian law separately requires or authorises a disclosure, including a subpoena, a court order, or a mandatory reporting obligation. Where such an obligation applies, only the information the obligation requires is disclosed, only to the proper recipient, and no more than is reasonably necessary.

Where you have authorised a disclosure, for example to a GP or another practitioner.

Information is also handled by the service providers described in the privacy policy, who process it on the practice’s behalf so that the practice can function.

Where professional supervision or case consultation occurs, information is de-identified wherever it is reasonably practicable. Anyone involved is bound by professional confidentiality, only the minimum necessary information is used, and identifiable information is shared only with your consent or another documented lawful basis.

Clinical notes are kept for every session. That is a professional requirement rather than a choice.

You can ask to see the information held about you and ask for it to be corrected. How that works, including the limited grounds on which access can lawfully be refused, is set out in the privacy policy.

Records are retained for at least seven years after your last appointment. Where information was collected while a person was under 18, it is retained until they turn 25. Those minimums come from the Health Records (Privacy and Access) Act 1997 (ACT), and records are kept longer where a complaint, legal proceeding or other legal obligation requires it.

The practice does not provide assessments, expert opinions or reports for court, custody or insurance purposes. Clinical notes are written to support your care, not to be read in a courtroom.

A subpoena or court order cannot be ignored. If records are compelled, Promise must comply, and will tell you unless the law prevents him from doing so. Where it is appropriate, he may raise objections or seek to limit what is produced.

Where a letter or report is agreed to and is within scope, it is charged at the session rate for the time it takes, agreed with you in advance.

In couples work the relationship is the focus. Both of you are clients, the record is shared, and information shared in session is known to both of you.

Promise does not hold secrets between partners. If you tell him something individually that materially affects the work, he will encourage you to bring it into the room, and may decline to continue the couples work if it cannot be.

That applies to individual contact too. If one of you emails or calls between sessions about the substance of the work, expect it to be raised in the room rather than held privately.

Because the record is shared, a request by one of you to access it will not always produce the complete record. Access may be refused, limited, or provided in another form where the law allows, including where giving it would pose a serious threat to any person, would unreasonably affect the other person’s privacy, would disclose information you are not entitled to receive, or where another lawful ground for refusal applies.

Where family violence is present or emerges, the safety of each of you comes before continuing the couples work. Couples work is not appropriate where one person is not safe to speak freely, and Promise will end it and help each of you find suitable individual support rather than continue.

Couples work may also end where a conflict of interest arises, where one of you withdraws, or where continuing is no longer clinically appropriate.

Whether Promise can later work individually with one of you is decided case by case, and often the answer is no. Having held both sides of a relationship makes it difficult to act for one person alone without a conflict, and where that is the case he will refer you on rather than take it up.

You can stop at any time, without explanation, and without owing anything beyond sessions already held or cancelled inside the notice window.

Promise may end the work where continuing is no longer clinically appropriate, where safety cannot be maintained, where a serious boundary violation has occurred, or where fees remain unpaid after being raised with you.

Where he ends the work, he will give you reasonable notice, explain why, and offer a referral to another service where that is practicable.

The Listening Room cannot respond to crises in real time and is not a substitute for emergency care.

Emergency: 000. If you or someone else is in immediate danger. Lifeline: 13 11 14. Crisis support, any hour of any day. Suicide Call Back Service: 1300 659 467. For anyone affected by suicidal thoughts.

You are welcome to raise a concern with Promise directly, and most things are resolved that way. You do not have to. Raising it with him first is an option, never a precondition.

You can complain to the Australian Association of Social Workers about the conduct of a social worker, at aasw.asn.au.

You can complain to the ACT Human Rights Commission about a health service or an ACT health record, at hrc.act.gov.au.

For a privacy complaint you can also go to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner at oaic.gov.au. Nothing here limits your right to go straight to a regulator, and you should where a matter is serious.

Nothing in these terms excludes, restricts or modifies any consumer guarantee, right or remedy you have under the Australian Consumer Law, which cannot be contracted out of. That includes the guarantee that services are provided with due care and skill.

To the maximum extent the law permits, and subject to the above, the practice is not liable for loss genuinely outside its reasonable control, such as the decisions you make in your own life or an outage of a platform it does not operate. That does not extend to a failure to take reasonable care in choosing, configuring or securing the services it uses.

These terms may be updated as the practice changes. Changes are not retrospective: the version that applies to you is the one you accepted.

Where a change is material, current clients are given reasonable notice before it takes effect, and are asked to accept the new version where that is appropriate. Previous versions are retained.

If any part of these terms is found to be unenforceable, that part is severed and the rest continues to apply.

If Promise does not enforce something on one occasion, that does not waive his right to enforce it later.

These terms are governed by the laws of the Australian Capital Territory and the Commonwealth of Australia. Nothing here limits your right to bring a matter in any forum the law makes available to you.

The practice is based in Curtin, in the Australian Capital Territory. Sessions are in person there or online.

Email is the formal channel for correspondence and for any notice under these terms. For anything about these terms, email hello@thelisteningroomau.com. For anything about your information or your privacy, email privacy@thelisteningroomau.com.

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