A Vision for the Psychological Professions

A Vision for the Psychological Professions in England

This month we published the Psychological Professions Vision for England here. This is a very exciting and significant moment. We have never had a published vision for the psychological professions in England before, but more importantly, this vision was built from the ground up. It involved over 2,000 individuals and organisations, a public consultation, and over 10,000 ideas lodged on the interactive #PsychologicalProfessionsIntoAction on line platform.  The Vision is also connected to the policy ambition of the NHS Long Term Plan, and sets out how we can contribute to delivering this.  The Vision will only be a success if it is used to support the transformation of services, and I believe it can. It commits us collectively as psychological professionals To transform lives and communities by extending and embedding psychological knowledge and practice across the whole of health and care. There is no shortage of ambition here! We know psychological interventions can transform lives and that psychological practice can support community change. We also know we have a huge task ahead to grow our psychological professions workforce by over 60% by 2024. That’s an increase of 10,000 psychological professions posts from March 2020. Working together, as a united group, we believe this can be possible. We are delighted to have expanded clinical psychology and child psychotherapy training intakes by over 60% in the past two years. We are also thrilled to be growing psychological therapy services rapidly, with meaningful choice hardwired into the developments. We have agreement to develop the first ever NHS funded psychotherapeutic counselling training this year, which will support the provision of a choice of depression therapies in IAPT services. I hope you will find the chance to discuss the Vision in your team, and in supervision, to review how you are contributing to fulfilling our collective commitments. I believe this vision can help to unite what has been a fragmented group of professions in the past, that has made us harder to hear. We are in a different place now, and through unity we can go from strength to strength and fulfil the ambition of the NHS Long Term Plan.

Dr Adrian Whittington, Co-chair, Psychological Professions Network, South East

National Lead for Psychological Professions, NHSE/I and HEE

IAPT National Clinical Advisor: Education