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Our mission and values

For 100 years, the Tavistock and Portman clinics have embodied a distinctive way of thinking about and understanding mental distress, mental health and emotional wellbeing. 

Working with children and families and adults, our approach brings together psychoanalytic, psychodynamic and systemic theory and practice and other approaches and seeks to understand the unconscious as well as conscious aspects of a person’s experience and places the person, their relationships and social context at the centre of our practice.

Our creative and skilled staff continue to build on these approaches, welcoming new ideas and developing innovative interventions, services and models of care which respond to contemporary challenges.

Our goal is that more people should have the opportunity to benefit from our approach. We seek to spread our thinking and practice through devising and delivering high quality clinical services, the provision of training and education, research, organisational consulting and influencing public debate.

Our aims

The Tavistock and Portman will:

  • continue to deliver and develop high quality and high impact patient services
  • offer training and education which meets the evolving needs of individuals and employers and helps transform the workforce in health, care and other sectors
  • develop its presence as a centre of excellence in research
  • lead the development and evaluation of new models of care and innovative approaches to addressing systemic issues in the delivery of care and other services
  • use its insights and expertise to contribute to the development of national debate and public policy. 

Our values

As an organisation:

  • we work with people with lived experience to co-create and improve our services and inform our decision making
  • we are caring and compassionate
  • we are passionate about the quality of our work and committed to openness, the use of evidence and the application of improvement science
  • we value all our staff, are concerned for their wellbeing and seek to foster leadership, innovation and excellence in our workforce
  • we embrace diversity in our workforce and work to make our services and training as accessible as possible
  • we work with others, in the UK and internationally, who share our values and can enable us to achieve our mission.