A user's perspective on the HPC process

Betty Bertrand-Godfrey very kindly agreed to my posting this here on the blog:

Report on the Manchester ‘Stakeholder’ Meeting organised by the Health Professions Council for UK stakeholders in Counselling and Psychotherapy. 31 March 2009.
By Betty Bertrand-Godfrey, a 'user' of psychoanalysis

As planned I went to the Manchester stakeholder meeting. Clearly the HPC's intention was to make us believe that statutory regulation is good for us - but they must be deluded and desperate.

Deluded first.
Prof Di Waller (HPC Council member, Chair of the Professional Liaison Group for Counselling Psychotherapy, and Arts Psychotherapist registrant of the HPC) opened the day with a very positive statement: " We have got a pretty good start on the work", she said.

I have observed two PLG meetings and I didn't think so. This was confirmed by the discussion we had at the end of the day when the PLG (at last) asked the floor's views on the matter. It was felt strongly that even the split between titles was a problem and suggested that everything was to be put on hold until the HPC finds a better way of dealing with this mammoth tasks. So not a "pretty" but an "ugly" start then!

One highlight of the day for me was Di Waller being genuinely surprised that the "fear of NOS keeps cropping up" (National Operating Standards). At the break I had a quiet word with an HPC representative and told him that having the Chair of NOS from Skills for Health on the PLG certainly does help this "cropping up". I also said that HPC wants to gain our "trust" but how can we do this when we think Prof Fonagy has been pushed in. I must say that the representative looked uneasy with this issue and I sensed almost agreed with me.

HPC denies categorically that it will refer to the NOS guidelines for setting their standards of proficiency and said that "it will actually be quite unhelpful" (Michael Guthrie, Acting Director of Policy and Standards). But in my little chat I also mentioned that if HPC registration goes through then we know it is an open door for further rules to be implemented that will damage the core of most therapeutic work.

Desperate now.
At 11:40, we had the most incredible power point presentation I have ever seen. Mary Smith (Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists, and HPC registrant) put together images and words destined to five-year-olds. She seemed to want to make us believe that registration is fantastic and that we should all go for it with all our hearts and souls. The way she operated was weird, very weird indeed, and clumsy. I felt she was trying to hypnotise the whole room but all she managed to do was irritate us by taking up precious space that could have been dedicated to proper grown-up debate.

In substance she said we should (I am quoting now) "abandon ourselves to the process and leave the professional bodies behind. You need to pass it all over to the HPC. There will be a moment of bereavement and we ourselves (SLT) felt that we were handing stuff away but we need to have that clear blue water (here was the soothing image of a lake on her power point presentation at the same time!) that can only allow the transition". Basically, she said: go to sleep - resistance to HPC is futile! A shame she had to go and could not reflect on Prof Parker's (Manchester Met University) beautiful intervention: he urged people to be cautious, but most of all to THINK.

At last in the afternoon we broke out into rooms. I happened to be with Sally Aldridge (BACP), Jonathan Coe (Witness) representing HPC but more interestingly the stakeholders Prof Darian Leader (College of Psychoanalysts, UK), Dennis Greenwood (Universities Psychotherapy and Counselling Association) and some serious opponents to this process. This is how it should have been right from the beginning. Darian reminded us that the White Paper (Trust Assurance and Safety) says "whether the HPC can accommodate the profession" not how. The "whether" has had no space to be discussed so far.

Then at 2:40pm (after only 40 min of intense discussions in small groups) we got back to the wider group where at last something more real was debated and animosity, fear and anxieties were emerging (which I think surprised the HPC-PLG people). I must say Janet Low (representing the Philadelphia Association), Ian Parker, and Nick Totton (from the Independent Practitioner’s Network) were brilliant and inspirational. The quality of their interventions allowed more people to join in to challenge HPC.

On departing I asked Michael Guthrie if he had the intention to feed back to this group by setting another meeting as people were anxious as to what was going to become of all that was said during the day. I emphasised the need for a real meeting and not some feedback on the HPC website because this is where it all happens.

He said he will have to think about it and thanked me.