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How important is confidentiality?
It is really important. Usually, people have waited quite a while to disclose anything at all, and they really need to be reassured that it's going to stay with who they are talking to. There are the few exceptions, a safeguarding issue for instance or something like that, but that's not particularly relevant when you are making your first disclosure, I think you need to have confidence in the person that you're talking to, that they know how to help you and that they aren't going to be discussing it with anyone else without your permission. If you're asking for help outside of the workplace, you might need to tell somebody else as well, but that first disclosure needs to be kept confidential, if you are not sure what to do with that information, then you can talk about it between you, if the information needs to be escalated, it would probably because it was affecting how you did your job, maybe you couldn't keep the hours maybe you couldn't go into the outside world or things like that. If it means a real change in your employment circumstances then it probably would have to be escalated, but then it would only be on a need-to-know basis, and not general knowledge.
When you are starting up a conversation with somebody, How would you reassure them that everything that they are going to say is going to be kept confidentially?
I think that be one of the first things you would say you could perhaps say something like, "Everything you say to me can stay in this room unless there's a need to escalate it. In which case, we can talk about how that might be managed", but generally speaking, what they talk about within the room with wanted to, except in such safeguarding, would stay there. And I think that would probably really help the conversation.
