We know that discrimination remains an issue across health and care.
At the HCPC, we have been working to address this and to help build a health and care system where both service users and professionals experience a respectful, fair and safe environment.
Helping registrants to navigate discrimination
Thousands of health and care professionals from all backgrounds and from all over the world provide excellent care and support to people across the UK day after day.
We know that many health and care professionals unfortunately continue to experience forms of abuse or discrimination in the course of their work – both from people they work with and from service users.
We are clear, that none of our registrants should ever have to tolerate abuse, intimidation, or feel unsafe at work.
All of our registrants are also required to ensure that their personal values, biases and beliefs do not lead them to discriminate against service users, carers or colleagues. A registrant’s personal values, biases and beliefs must not detrimentally impact the care, treatment or other services that HCPC registered professionals provide.
New one stop resource
We have produced some new resources to support registrants to understand how to use the HCPC standards of conduct, performance and ethics and standards of proficiency, when they decide how to respond when experiencing or witnessing abuse or discrimination, while still ensuring service users remain safe.
These resources also clarify what registrants and learners can expect from education providers and outline how employers can support too.
Service user safety must always remain the primary concern when making decisions. We expect registrants to act in line with the policies, guidance, and direction provided by their employer and professional body.
The resources we have developed are designed to help show how our existing standards apply in responding to all forms of discrimination.
The safety and wellbeing of registrants is a shared responsibility across the sector, with regulators, employers and policy makers all having a role to play. We will always seek to protect registrants and service users from discrimination in all our work as a health regulator.
What do the new resources include?
The new resources provide additional information to help registrants better understand how to use our standards, particularly when facing challenging situations such as discrimination or abuse. We have also produced a series of short case studies which demonstrate how registrants, learners and education providers have navigated discrimination in different contexts.
The resources also support registrants in their duty to challenge discrimination when they witness it, demonstrating how registrants have dealt with similar situations.
Take a look at the new resources to help registrants to navigate discrimination here.
Our role in tackling discrimination
We are committed to taking decisive action where instances of discrimination occur within the professions we regulate. Recognising the rise in antisemitism, Islamophobia and other forms of racially or religiously motivated discrimination, we have published new materials to illustrate the sorts of conduct that has led to regulators taking action to protect the public.
We know that as a regulator, our wider role in addressing and tackling discrimination extends beyond making clear what is expected of our registrants through our standards of conduct performance and ethics.
Internally, we are working to help our staff to better recognise and deal with any forms of discrimination by raising awareness of antisemitism and Islamophobia among colleagues. This builds on specific sexual safety training we introduced for all staff last year, in addition to our annual equality, diversity, and inclusion training for all staff.
We are also working to strengthen the support for decision makers at each stage of the fitness to practise (FTP) process, to improve consistency across all FTP decisions, in line with our revised sanctions policy, which was published earlier this year. Our updated guidance reinforces that all forms of discrimination are unacceptable and sets out relevant factors for panels to consider.
