To be or not to be
Why I can no longer call myself what I am.
Between 2002 and 2005 I paid over £10,000 to complete and be awarded the post grad Dramatherapy certification, through Roehampton University. The training was robust, hard, demanding, and emotionally overwhelming. At the end of the three years on completion of the training I was able to call myself a Dramatherapist, or so I thought.
That is until the Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC) told me that unless I register with them paying a yearly registration fee, I could not call myself legally a Dramatherapist.
Therefore, for the last 15 years I paid my registration.
However, over the 15 years of registration no one from HCPC ever contacted to me to check on my CPD, I never received an informational or guidance email from HCPC, and yet HCPC job was to make sure I was still an up to date legal and acting ethical Dramatherapist. If, I proposed, that HCPC jobs was to ensure I was law abiding, why had it never in 15 years checked that I was abiding by the law? The paying of a registration does not mean that I follow the law, what I asked was what did HCPC actually do. How does HCPC get from providing CPD evidence to ensuring that a practitioner is working within the ethical and moral framework? It would seem to me that HCPC would only know someone was acting against the ethical code, when that had acted against the ethical code. Which, also mean that that at some point someone would have to be assaulted by a practitioner for HCPC to then uphold its mandate which is to protect the public. It is possible to be a high skills therapist and still abuse a client.
I began to ask myself what HCPC service was I paying for and how did they support me in the growth of my professionalism and work?
It felt to me that each year I was paying to be regulated, to ensure that I followed the ethic, as if I was not able to, I found it hard to understand that having the registration number meant that someone would know I was working ethically, when in fact for 15 years I had never been asked to demonstrate my ethical work by HCPC.
I see this a lock in cycle; it’s impossible to be free from. As long as I have a registration number I can call myself a Dramatherapist. Someone could then assume that the registration means that I am checked on my practice. However, I can only register with HCPC if I have the recognised professional qualification, which means too register, I am seen as a professional Dramatherapist. Yet, I cannot practice or call myself a Dramatherapist unless I register. I am simultaneously a Dramatherapist and not a Dramatherapist, that is if I do not pay my registrations.
As much as HCPC says that is it there to support its practitioners, the HCPC is not a supportive professions association, it’s a government mandated monitoring body, of which I pay to keep in operation, an operation I have never seen active. And so this year I found that I could not ethically pay for registration. This would mean that legally I could not call myself Dramatherapist.
I was also particularly troubled by the HCPC response to the pandemic, art therapist found themselves without work suddenly having to rethink their working practice. HCPC offered no support or guidance. All I received from HCPC during the early part of “lock down” was if I did not pay my fees I would be removed from the register and then would not be able to work in a profession I had worked hard to train in. If I stopped paying for registration, I would then need to pay both a re-registration fee along with registration. This during one of the most economically challenging times that art therapist have known.
I see this as an outrage.
I am an ethical practitioner, at all time I work to ensure that the people I engage in a mutual supportive alliance or held, supported, challenged, confronted, and met.
This will not change just because I am no longer registered as a Dramatherapist. My 30 years of training, experience, and accountability do not cease to exist because I am not registered, the hours of work I have allotted for personal developed over the 30 years does not cease to exist because I am not registered, my personal ethics and morals do not cease to exist because I am not registered. As a professional, my approach, integrity, and care do not cease to exist because I am not registered.
Nothing changes, everything I am and offer remains the same.