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As you will see from this newsletter, we have had a busy time since January, and there is no sign of the pace slackening. After a preliminary meeting with Graham Bright MP and Stanley Clinton-Davis the scheduled meeting with the Minister took place and we are now dealing with the letter written to Graham Bright about that meeting. The day before that meeting, I went to the Department of Health to meet the civil servant who advises the Minister and had a meeting which was friendly enough on the surface, but was rather tense and difficult. His basic question was; why should he consider all the varieties of psychotherapy that we represent, rather than sticking to a few well-known brands? We shall answer this in our reply to the Minister's letter. Part of the Council's response is a decision to set up an Audit Sub-Committee which will keep us informed about research in psychotherapy and will initiate a plan for ongoing audit of our members.
I attended the meeting at the House of Commons where the new Minister, Stephen Dorrell, talked to the Parliamentary Group for Complementary Medicine. I was able to get him to confirm that in order to achieve recognition a group should represent the majority of practitioners in the field and should have a coherent policy. This puts emphasis on our need to stick together if we are to achieve recognition as the professional body for psychotherapy.
Dorothy Hamilton and I had a further meeting with Graham Bright and Lord Clinton-Davis in July at which we roughed out a policy for further action and a reply to the ministerial letter. Both are due to be discussed at the meeting of Council on 15 September.
On my daily visits to the office I see a steady stream of letters, notes, etc. Amongst this paperwork there have been two rather alarming items. The first one was a note to say that the DoH is calling a meeting to discuss registration and UKSCP, but not inviting us; the details are in the report of the joint Registration and European Subcommit