The Professional Standards Authority (PSA) has reaccredited BACP for another year, with three conditions and one recommendation.

The PSA reviews our processes every 12 months, focusing on our work to protect the public. It looks at how we uphold professional standards, including how we carry out our complaints procedure, and also at our financial status and governance processes.

This year it carried out a targeted review, seeking further detail on some specific areas of our work, including the management of our register, standards, education and training, complaints and governance.

It’s not uncommon for the PSA to carry out targeted reviews of registers that they accredit, and the review wasn’t related to any one particular issue.

The PSA has now released its report on our register’s reaccreditation. The reaccreditation is subject to three conditions and one recommendation of action that it believes could help to improve our work.

The conditions are:

  • We should obtain an independent, authoritative review of our Good practice in action resource on working with suicidal clients in the counselling professions (GPiA 042) by someone who is not an author of the report, to ensure it fully aligns with the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence’s (NICE’s) guideline on self-harm: assessment, management and preventing recurrence (NG225).
  • We should share our updated GPiA 042 and supporting guidance with our members.
  • We must demonstrate we’ve informed our education and training providers of the need to include the underpinning evidence base (as set out in NG225) in teaching on suicide risk assessment and that self-assessment risk assessment tools are unable to accurately predict suicide.

We’re taking steps to address each of these conditions in full and will complete this work within three months of the publication of the PSA’s report. This includes amended guidance for members alongside a video resource.

The PSA also recommended:

  • We should consider how to make clearer that the remit of the accreditation quality mark only extends to members working within the UK, and how adjunctive therapies are presented.

. We’ll be sharing our progress on this with the PSA as part of our report for our next reaccreditation process.

We welcome the opportunity to have our work reviewed by an independent organisation and we’re committed to making improvements to our services to ensure we continue to offer the best possible support to the public and our members.

Read the full report on the PSA’s website.