Annual Meeting - 10 Sep 09

Thursday, 10th September 2009. The HPC annual meeting.

It is not immediately clear what status this meeting has - ie it is not the AGM of a charity, nor that of a registered company - there are no votes taken, and no body of people who have any power to bring to bear on the organisation. Formally, the HPC is answerable to Privy Council - and none of them was present, as far as I could tell.

In the absence of any legal framework within which to understand the meeting (in the absence of any statutes or formally written rules) we are left to deduce the meaning from the work that it does on the day, the way this enters the daily business, and of course, the way it describes itself on the website: "Our annual meeting is the Council's opportunity to reflect on the last year's business in a public setting... a short talk given by the President, followed by a question and answer session."

Two of us had submitted questions ahead of time, me and the woman from MIND. First, Chairwoman Anna van der Gaag made her brief reflections, then we were invited to pose our questions.

MIND wanted to know whether there had been any problems arising from the regulation of the psychologists (1 July), and in particular whether anyone had made use of Principled Non-Compliance to reject the HPC.

The question was an informed and an intelligent one, and opened a welcome window onto the real world for the HPC. There is a tendency for things to get caught up in political (and Political) rhetoric so this question from the grass roots campaigning mental health user network was a great opportunity for the HPC spokesman Marc Seale (CEO) to make some real political capital.

I'm not really sure what he said, however. There were a lot of words, and he was smiling a great deal - this is what I wrote down at the time: "when you talk to professionals who are regulated, they are very proud, and embarrassingly positive ..." Chairwoman Anna van der Gaag (an expert in speech and language therapy) later summarised the answer: "it is too soon yet for any of us to know".

The question that I had sent in was on behalf of a colleague: "If a therapist is registered with the HPC, how does this affect the use of other unregulated therapies within their practice? For example an HPC registered psychotherapist using life coaching, hypnotherapy or other styles of therapy with their client."

This question has often been asked by those turning their attention for the first time to the HPC - I hear it asking: if I submit to your power, register my name, and pay the annual fee, will I be able to carry on practicing in the way I always have? If it were just a tax raised to fund the fitness to practice machinery, then the answer would be yes. It is not just a tax, however, but a whole new system of belief.

What did Marc Seale say? "This is a question about scope of practice. If you are regulated, and a complaint is made against you in one of your unregulated practices, we would still deal with that."

In her opening reflections, Anna van der Gaag mentioned that some of the professionals joining the HPC could rejoice in a reduction of fee from £667 to £76pa. With this, Anna let slip that, for her, the HPC is an alternative to registration with the existing practice based organisations - it is a rival to the existing professional bodies, and one that ultimately wants to replace professional bodies. She went on to say that the HPC represented a new kind of regulatory body, specifically 'a change from the paternalistic method' which she fleshed out with a quote from Don Berwick's John Hunt Lecture 2008 (entitled: Epitaph of a Profession !):

"we professionals are not our patient's partners. We are guests in their lives. We are not hosts. We are not priests in the cathedral of technology."

Well, leaving aside the irony that she must refer to a great man, speaking in the name of another great man in order to undermine a system based on great men, and forgetting for the moment the limitations of the metaphor of guest, what Anna seems to be arguing for is a change in attitude, conduct, and behaviour. She is calling, I think, for humbleness, whilst claiming that the HPC knows how to bring everyone to their knees.