The Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC) is a statutory regulator of 308,000 health and care professionals from 16 professions in the United Kingdom. It was set up in 2003 under the National Health Service Reform and Health Care Professions Act 2002, to replace the Council for Professions Supplementary to Medicine (CPSM). The Council reports its main purpose is to protect the public. It does this by setting and maintaining standards of proficiency and conduct for the professions it regulates. Its key functions include approving education and training programmes which health and care professionals must complete before they can register with the HCPC; and maintaining and publishing a Register of health and care providers who meet pre-determined professional requirements and standards of practice.
On 1 August 2012, the HCPC took over the regulation of social workers in England from the General Social Care Council. To reflect this change, the HPC was renamed the Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC) to better reflect the increasingly diverse range of professions it regulates. These changes were made by government as part of the Health and Social Care Act 2012. The HCPC has also reported it was being accorded new powers to set up voluntary registers for unregulated professions or related professions, including students seeking to enter a regulated or unregulated profession or related occupation.
The work of the HCPC and other health professions regulators in the UK (e.g. General Medical Council, Nursing and Midwifery Council, General Dental Council, etc.) is overseen by the Council for Healthcare Regulatory Excellence (CHRE). Instances of professional misconduct, if an individual provider is found to not meet Council standards, can lead to dismissal from the National Health Service.
Read more about Health And Care Professions Council: Professions Regulated By The HCPC
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“Youth no less becomes
The light and careless livery that it wears
Than settled age his sables and his weeds,
Importing health and graveness.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Men’s hearts are cold. They are indifferent. Not all the coal that is dug warms the world. It remains indifferent to the lives of those who risk their life and health down in the blackness of the earth; who crawl through dark, choking crevices with only a bit of lamp on their caps to light their silent way; whose backs are bent with toil, whose very bones ache, whose happiness is sleep, and whose peace is death.”
—Mother Jones (1830–1930)
“God bless the physician who warms the speculum or holds your hand and looks into your eyes. Perhaps one subtext of the health care debate is a yen to be treated like a whole person, not just an eye, an ear, a nose or a throat. A yen to be human again, on the part of patient and doctor alike.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“Friendship takes place between those who have an affinity for one another, and is a perfectly natural and inevitable result. No professions nor advances will avail.... It is a drama in which the parties have no part to act.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Daughter to that good Earl, once President
Of England’s Council and her Treasury,
Who lived in both, unstain’d with gold or fee,
And left them both, more in himself content.
Till the sad breaking of that Parliament
Broke him, as that dishonest victory
At Chaeronea, fatal to liberty,
Kill’d with report that old man eloquent;—”
—John Milton (1608–1674)