We held our Accredited Registers seminar last month, which included, for the first time, our Accredited Registers Good Practice Awards. We introduced the awards to encourage good practice among the registers and a shared understanding of our values – the ‘Four Pillars’ of Confidence, Choice, Quality and Protection.
Registers could nominate themselves or others. The winners on the day were:
- Confidence - UK Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP) for their ‘Learning from Complaints’ event held in June 2022 and good practice in being open about complaints and sharing their learning from complaints made to them with others.
- Choice - Play Therapy UK (PTUK) for its work on the Children’s Mental Health Charter and raising awareness of the need for children to have access to a registered therapist to support their mental health and wellbeing.
- Quality - Save Face for their rigorous work to raise standards, promote awareness of the register and working with the media to uncover dangerous practice for non-surgical cosmetic procedures and protect the public.
- Protection - British Psychoanalytic Council for its work on promoting equality, diversity, and inclusion on areas such as sexual orientation.
In this blog, the Award winners discuss the work they have been doing to help reinforce the four pillars of the programme and how sharing good practice is an important aspect of the Accredited Registers programme.
UKCP: Confidence category
‘UKCP receives complaints that range from serious professional misconduct to expressions of dissatisfaction with a service. Whatever the cause or severity, each complaint is an opportunity for learning. By highlighting the causes of complaints, we hope to enable our registrants to avoid circumstances in which trigger points may arise.
In June 2022, UKCP held our annual Learning from Complaints event. Hosted by our Professional Conduct Committee and our complaints and conduct team, it gave our registrants the opportunity to gain insight into the work of the committee and receive guidance on case law and topical issues. We outlined the complaints process, explained the impact of COVID-19 on our work and discussed recurring themes in complaints including the principles of confidentiality. An innovation for this event was that we included an interactive case study.
Attendees’ feedback was very positive, especially on the case study exercise. One participant told us: “The case study was brilliant … It really humanised a scary part of being a therapist.”
We are delighted and honoured to receive the Confidence Award. It is especially meaningful for us as it recognises our continuing commitment to protect the public and promote public confidence in the psychotherapy profession. We would like to thank our colleagues at BACP for nominating us.’
Play Therapy UK: Choice category
‘The staff and practitioners of Play Therapy UK would like to thank the PSA for listing us amongst their Award winners for 2023.
We are delighted that the vital importance of gathering evidence from real world practice has been recognised to this degree. Running alongside best practice, the recording and publishing of our impact in numbers has been at the forefront of our research drive for many years. Most recently we were able to report that: from over 5,000 children who attended Play Therapy with PTUK practitioners in the last 12-months, eight out of every 10 children with the most severe difficulties showed improvement in their mental health and wellbeing following Play Therapy. This improvement is consistent across over 20,000 cases over the past three years. Gathering data from real-world practice, from Play Therapy Sessions in Play Therapy Rooms across the globe, provides highly relevant and replicable findings.
PTUK continue as sponsors of the Child Mental Health Charter, where we are gathering support in both the House of Lords and the House of Commons, for the inclusion of early and expert intervention in the upcoming new Mental Health Bill, using this very practice-based evidence in support of the cause.
We are so pleased to have our work for early intervention in mental health recognised by the PSA – and thank them for championing the importance of child mental health as we all look to the future.’
Save Face: Quality category
‘We are delighted to have been awarded the Quality award at the inaugural Accredited Register Good Practice Awards. The award validates our commitment to upholding the highest standards for governance, registration, and complaints handling. We were also commended for the work we do in raising public awareness which has been key to enabling us not only to help people from falling into unsafe hands but also to bring about changes in the law.
We are humbled to have been chosen for this award and it means a great deal more considering the landscape in which we operate. Aesthetic medicine is a field unlike any other, there are as many rogue and unsafe operators as there are safe and ethical. When we established Save Face in 2014, we knew we had to deliver a register that provides the public with absolute assurance with who they entrust their health and appearance, and equally, to provide the practitioners who register with us a tangible means of being able to differentiate themselves from the unsafe. We are delighted to be recognised for our commitment to delivering a robust accreditation and assessment model to give the pubic the confidence to choose to use our register. It also is a credit to the practitioners who have voluntarily chosen to be subject to scrutiny and strive to implement better standards of practice and provide so many people an avenue to access safe and ethical treatments.’
British Psychoanalytic Council: Protection category
‘Our annual Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Now conference looks at current issues through a psychoanalytic lens. In our 2021 conference we looked at Sexual Diversity and Psychoanalysis: acknowledging the past and looking to the future. The event sought to recognise the difficult past with a statement that regrets the pathological diagnoses of homosexuality and consequent exclusion of LGBT voices and look to the future by bringing together contemporary psychoanalytic thinking on sexual diversity which moved beyond heteronormative assumptions. We published a Statement of Regret in November 2021 that sought to acknowledge and address previous harm and initiate discussion with registrants on sexual orientation and psychoanalysis.’
You can find out more about the Accredited Registers programme here. Use our
check-a-practitioner tool to check and find practitioners near you who are either on an Accredited Register or registered with one of the 10 health or social care professional regulators.