2009, 17 February

Chair's Bulletin

17 February 2009
This is an exciting and anxiety provoking year for all psychotherapy or counselling organisations. We must manage initiatives on HPC as regulator, the Skills for Health work on NOS, the IAPT programme and all its tentacles, not to mention NICE, Savoy, the Health Care Commission - and reacting to any more that spontaneously pop up.

That in itself would be more than enough for any organisation to manage. But we must also face the challenge of modernising the organisation of the UKCP. We must become more inclusive and have systems in place that allow us to produce better quality services, have better consistency and provide a modicum of stability. External and internal dynamics are testing our ability to support and represent psychotherapy and psychotherapeutic counselling in an unprecedented way. Add to this the credit crunch and the government's philosophy of control that seems to be its only model for managing anxiety, and it is all too apparent that we are in the middle of a challenge that will either give us a position to continue to develop or could destroy the richness of psychotherapy.

Our internal growth has been mostly invisible. We need to do more to show the work of UKCP's Boards, Committees and Staff. Poster papers at the AGM that we will publish on the website at a later date will give us a better picture of this work and the effort and cost going into it. I have tried a purely subjective figure on a few people illustrating both the threat and opportunity we have as an organisation. It appears that we have a staff bill of about £350k-400k per year and also between £1.5m and £2m of volunteer work being done. This includes work at MO and Section level. The average age of committee members increases every year. This isn't an ageist statement, but one that recognises that to sustain this effort we have to attract more people at the beginning or middle of their career, as well as nurturing those who have given so much service to the UKCP.

On behalf of the Board of Trustees I would like to thank all registrants. Volunteers and staff who have worked so extraordinarily hard to support us and who give us the opportunity to keep a place in the world for the art and science of psychotherapy as practised in the UKCP.

Yours sincerely

James Antrican
Chair