Our counselling Manager Jenneke Scott grew up in freezing cold Canada where she used to have to shovel her car out in the mornings to get to work. She studied Psychology and then went on to study social work and has a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology, Honours in Social work and a Master of Social Work. Her career started in Canada working with the police and families in need before moving to Australia over 12 years ago.  She was recruited to with at risk children, offender work and high risk infant consulting before making the move to fertility counselling over 10 years ago and she hasn’t looked back. Having experienced loss herself, she is passionate about bereavement work within the context of infertility and allowing people the space to process their journey.

Her passion for person centred care stems working with marginalised and disenfranchised groups and seeing how mainstream services often treated them like another number. This is what attracted her to working at No.1 Fertility as she heard from colleagues about the individualised care and support offered by all staff. She feels blessed to work in a team that is made up of amazing women who care deeply about the emotional wellbeing of patients and each other. There is not a day of work that doesn’t go by that the team support each other but also find time to check in and also have a laugh.

One of her main goals as the counselling department manager is to ensure the team and wider staff of No. 1 feel supported to provide empathic and responsive care to patients and to ensure patients feel heard when it comes to their care and emotional health. As a practitioner she enjoys working with individuals and couples and has a keen interest in donor and surrogacy work. She secretly enjoys policy and program development and her team know if she comes down the hall with a to-do list, they should run the other way!

When she is not at work she is often seen on hikes or camping (that’s the Canadian in her) and trying new restaurants. Daily gratitude practice is also incorporated into the start of the day and at the end as she knows from personal experience and the research that practicing gratitude daily can set up us for a positive mindset. Most days she is grateful for her kind and caring colleagues, her family, but mostly for coffee and chocolate!