A practical guide for provisional psychologists on continuity of care when therapy ends because a placement ends, including handover, consent, timing, and documentation.
Most writing about ending therapy assumes the ending is about the client. Goals have been met. The client is not benefiting and needs a different service. Risk has changed and a higher level of care is required. In each version, the decision to end is a clinical judgement about the client's needs.
For a provisional psychologist on placement, whether a university clinical placement or the year-long 5+1 internship that follows it, a large proportion of endings do not happen for any of those reasons. They happen because the placement ends. The rotation finishes. The contract runs out. The client is midway through active work, and the reason therapy is ending has nothing to do with their readiness and everything to do with the trainee's calendar.
This is a different ethical situation from a planned discharge, and it is one almost nothing is written about from the trainee's side, probably because naming it risks sounding like an accusation against every provisional psychologist who has ever had to leave a placement partway through someone's care. That is not the intention here. The point is almost the opposite: this is a structural feature of the training pathway, and the Code of Conduct actually anticipates it directly. Knowing what it requires turns an uncomfortable, ad hoc goodbye into a defensible, well-managed one.
Imagine you have been seeing a teenager with anxiety for four months. Sessions are going well. Then, three weeks before your placement finishes, you tell them someone else will be taking over. Nothing clinically has changed. The therapy has not reached a natural ending. The calendar has.
Jump to a section:
Section 4.7 of the Psychology Board's Code of conduct for psychologists, effective 1 December 2025, is titled "Maintaining continuity of services." It is not written only for retirement, illness, or client-initiated discharge. One sentence speaks directly to the situation provisional psychologists commonly find themselves in:
"Give advance notice, if possible, to clients and associated and third parties as early as possible, of plans to close or relocate your work setting, or when you move between work settings."
Although placements are not mentioned specifically, completing a placement ordinarily involves moving between work settings, making this provision highly relevant. The Code does not discuss placements by name, but the same continuity principles it sets out for illness, relocation, and closing a practice appear to apply when a provisional psychologist moves between placements, not a lesser, informal version of an ending because the psychologist did not choose it for clinical reasons.
The section also requires that psychologists:
"Make reasonable plans for the continuity of service to clients when your relationship must end, including helping clients identify alternative appropriate practitioners and passing on relevant information with clients' consent when it is practical.""Take reasonable steps to reduce the likelihood of ending the service relationship prematurely or abruptly and, where possible, decide with clients when it will be appropriate to end the service.""Where practical, inform clients as early as possible if you need to end the service."
Looking across those requirements, they are not asking whether the ending is justified; a placement finishing is a legitimate reason to end a service relationship. Those are the considerations the Code emphasises: enough lead time, planning, and client involvement to avoid the ending landing as abrupt or unexplained. That is something a provisional psychologist has real influence over, even when the end date itself is not their decision.
Importantly, these obligations are framed in terms of reasonableness. Section 4.7 says "reasonable plans," "reasonable steps," and "where practical," not a guarantee of a perfect handover. A provisional psychologist cannot ensure continuity where organisational decisions, staffing shortages, or unexpected circumstances make that impossible. The obligation is to take reasonable steps within one's own role, raise concerns early, document those efforts, and work collaboratively with a supervisor and the service, not to personally guarantee an outcome that may depend on decisions made well above the trainee's level.
Section 4.2, Informed consent, requires that psychologists:
"Inform clients of the period for which consent will be relied on in the absence of significant changes.""Revisit consent when the period of time referred to above has passed, or there has been a significant change to the service or another aspect of the service-related relationship."
This points toward something many trainees find awkward to say out loud: telling a new client, near the start of treatment, that the psychologist is working within a placement of a defined length. That can feel like undermining the client's confidence, or drawing attention to inexperience.
Section 4.2 does not expressly require disclosure of placement duration. But read alongside section 4.7, it supports discussing foreseeable changes that may affect continuity of care, and it is difficult to see how a client can meaningfully participate in that planning if they first learn the placement is ending in the final few weeks. Early disclosure is not spelled out line by line; it is the more defensible reading of the two sections together.
Saying nothing until the end date is close does not avoid the disclosure. It delays it to the point where the client has the least ability to prepare, and the psychologist has the least time to arrange a proper handover, the kind of abrupt ending section 4.7 seeks to reduce.
The Code draws a specific distinction that is easy to blur in practice.
Referral is defined as involving "the transfer (in part) of responsibility for the service, usually for a defined time and a particular purpose, such as a service that is beyond the boundaries of the referring practitioner's competence."
Handover is defined more completely: "the process of transferring all responsibility for a service to another practitioner."
A placement ending will often, though not always, involve a handover rather than a referral. Some services genuinely refer a client externally because the service itself is no longer able to provide treatment, which is a referral, not a handover. But where the provisional psychologist's own involvement is ending while the client's need for a service continues, that is usually a handover. The client is not being sent elsewhere for a specific specialist input while the original psychologist retains overall responsibility. The original psychologist is leaving the service entirely, and someone else needs to take over the whole of the client's care.
This is not just a semantic distinction, and it is not unique to psychology. The Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care includes standardised clinical handover as part of its national Communicating for Safety standard, one of the eight National Safety and Quality Health Service Standards most accredited health services are required to meet. Continuity of care at the point of transition is treated as a system-level safety issue across healthcare generally, not just a psychology-specific rule. Section 5.4 of the Board's Code states:
"Understand that your legal responsibility for the tasks or service being provided could continue until the referral or handover is accepted."
In practice: giving a client a name and a phone number would not ordinarily amount to a completed handover. If the receiving practitioner has not actually accepted responsibility for the client, has not confirmed they will take the case, has not received the relevant information, has not started seeing the client, the outgoing psychologist's professional responsibility for that client, subject to their role within the service and any applicable legal or organisational arrangements, may not yet have ended, regardless of whether the placement itself has finished. A handover that stalls after a provisional psychologist has already left creates exactly the gap the Code's continuity provisions are designed to prevent.
The Code's continuity obligations in section 4.7 are written to the individual psychologist: "you" must give notice, "you" must make reasonable plans. Read in isolation, that can feel like the whole weight of managing a placement ending sits on the trainee.
In practice, a provisional psychologist typically does not control several of the variables that determine whether a good handover is even possible: whether the service has a receiving clinician lined up, whether new or complex clients are still being allocated close to a known placement end date, and how much lead time exists between "the placement is ending" being known internally and it being communicated to the trainee.
This is where the supervision provisions in section 10 become relevant, even though they do not mention termination by name. Section 10.1 requires supervisors to "oversee the supervisees' service-related behaviour and give appropriate feedback and guidance," and section 10.3 requires that supervisors, "when appropriate, make it clear to provisional psychologists and registrars what the scope is of their role in providing services to clients, document this, and explain the situation to clients and associated parties." The Code does not spell out that this extends to end-of-placement planning specifically. This is an extension of the principle, not a direct quote. But it is a reasonable one: if a complex client is allocated close to a known placement end date without adequate continuity planning, responsibility for managing that transition is unlikely to rest solely with the provisional psychologist. It is, at least in part, a service-design outcome shaped by decisions made above them.
That does not remove the provisional psychologist's own obligation under 4.7. It does mean this is a legitimate thing to raise directly with a supervisor, in these terms, well before the end date arrives, not a favour you are asking, but a continuity-of-care conversation the Code anticipates both of you having a role in. Continuity of care is ultimately both an individual professional obligation and an organisational one; the Code places specific duties on the psychologist, but it cannot manufacture a receiving clinician or extra lead time where the service has not planned for either.
Consider a related scenario: a placement scheduled to finish in six weeks receives a new referral for a client with complex trauma needing long-term therapy. The question worth asking is not only whether the provisional psychologist is competent to begin that work, it is whether the service has a realistic plan for who will carry the case forward before treatment even starts.
At intake. Where appropriate, disclose the time-limited nature of the placement as part of informed consent, without framing it as a disclaimer that undermines the client's confidence. Document that this was discussed.
Once the end date is known. Revisit consent, per 4.2(h), if the approaching end represents "a significant change to the service"; for many clients, mid-treatment, it will. Start planning with real lead time, not in the final fortnight, and raise it with your supervisor if a receiving practitioner is not yet identified.
At handover. Distinguish, honestly, between a full handover and a referral for a specific purpose. Most placement endings are the former. Pass on relevant information "with clients' consent" as the Code requires. Confirm the receiving practitioner has actually accepted the case before treating your involvement as finished; a name on a piece of paper does not settle it, and your own responsibility may continue until it does.
Documentation. Record when the end date became known, when it was disclosed, what planning occurred, and when the handover was accepted, not just that the last session happened. Good records show this developed progressively, rather than being reconstructed after a concern has already been raised.
An ending driven by a placement finishing is not, by itself, evidence of anything gone wrong. Trainees leave placements; that is what a supervised training pathway looks like, and the Code treats it as an ordinary, foreseeable event rather than a failure.
What the Code actually cares about is whether that ending was disclosed early, planned with enough lead time to avoid abruptness, properly handed over rather than loosely referred, and documented along the way, the same structure that separates growth from breach in every other version of this question. A placement ending is not, in itself, an ethical problem. Failing to plan for that ending may be. The distinction is not whether therapy finishes because the placement ends, but whether the psychologist took reasonable steps to ensure continuity of care before it did.
This article provides general educational information for Australian psychologists and provisional psychologists. It is not legal or professional advice. Application of the Psychology Board of Australia's Code of Conduct depends on the circumstances of each service. Psychologists should consult the current Code, their supervisor, their organisation's policies, and their professional indemnity insurer for guidance specific to their situation.
Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care. National Safety and Quality Health Service Standards (2nd ed.), Standard 6: Communicating for Safety.
Psychology Board of Australia. (2024). Code of conduct for psychologists (Advance copy published November 2024). Effective from 1 December 2025. (Sections 4.2 Informed consent, 4.7 Maintaining continuity of services, 5.4 Delegation, referral and handover, 10.1 Teaching and supervising, 10.3 Provisional psychologists and registrars.)
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