Full speech: The new Care Professions Council shows the way to return to reality

Just imagine ... The new Care Professions Council, a return to trust and reality.

Taken from the new website, the section reproduced below refers directly to the possible prospects for counselling and psychotherapy:

2. CPC and the psychological therapies - a new ethos: connection, relationship and authenticity.

The task of persuading the public that the HPC offers effective protection from trained registered practitioners whom they might suppose could be trusted remains incomplete. Finding ways to reassure potential registrants of the benefits of state regulation of the psychological therapies, and to move forward with current regulatory intentions, has been difficult.

There has been steady support for the HPC's efforts from the business interests in the field; however responses to its Call for Ideas and last year’s Consultation included sustained opposition. The new CPC ethos outlined here is an acknowledgment of the validity of some of this opposition.

In its relations with the psychological therapies the CPC recognises that:

• While it is confident that the HPC has been a reasonable organisation to relate to, it accepts that its approach to the subtleties and sophistication of the psychological therapies has been alienated and technocratic;
  
  
• This alienating approach, and its basis in regulatory duress that the HPC has hitherto deployed, repeats many of the difficulties that clients bring to therapy and will be eliminated from the processes of the new CPC;
  
  
• It is intolerable that at present abusive practice is primarily detected and confronted by clients, leading to subsequent investigation and sanctions. The CPC will work strenuously, beginning with the psychological therapies community itself, to move to a pro-active practitioner accountability culture in which, through improved education and training, and peer scrutiny, abuse of clients approaches zero;
  
  
• Clients expect to be able to trust their practitioners. The CPC appreciates that many psychological practitioners do not have a level of trust in its processes that matches the trust they are expected to deliver for clients. Redressing this deficit is an urgent CPC priority.
  
  
• We now concede that ‘regulation’ as it has been proposed, or even ‘self-regulation’, is fundamentally mistaken. The CPC appreciates that previously claimed 'client protection' is undeliverable for psychological therapy clients. Gradated forms of ‘accountability’ that reflect domains of practice, practice populations, full- or part-time employment and levels of practitioner capability are more appropriate and realisable;
  
  
• The existing stringent, externally generated HPC regulatory framework, based on a ‘skills’ or ‘standards’ perspective, promotes false compliance in practitioners who disagree with them, or who find them problematic;
  
  
• Legally binding commitment to such externally generated practitioner protocols that are subject to legalistic fitness to practise protocols invites litigation and defensive practice and this will be ended; they will be replaced via ongoing experiential research that will identify qualities that are more relevant to clients, such as ‘practitioner presence’ and ‘practitioner capability’;
  
  
• Through existing processes of accreditation, supervision and re-accreditation, almost all psychological therapy practitioners are embedded in forms of accountability;
  
  
• Since a considerable proportion of psychological therapy practitioners have been long-term clients, they are highly aware and respectful of how clients experience practitioners;
  
  
• For at least a ‘good enough’ client experience, practitioners need to be embedded in local cultures of accountability that provide proactive, values-congruent scrutiny of practitioner capability and its potential deficits, and that are able to reflect the diversity of the psy field.
  
  
• With appropriate support, an educated person can be enabled to self-assess the quality and extent of their own and their colleagues’ capabilities and presence, and how this plays out in their work with clients. Trainings that do not support an ability to deliver this capability will be deprecated.

Now that's more like it. How might we bring this about?