Health and Care Professions Council: protecting whom?

The Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC), formerly known as The Council for Professions Supplementary to Medicine (CPSM), describes itself as a regulator, set up in response to a piece of legislation called the Health Professions Order 2001, with a specific remit to protect the public by registering health and care professionals and ensuring they meet the standards for their training, professional skills, behaviour and health (HCPC, 2013).

However, despite this remit, it remains questionable as to whether the training, skills, and behaviour of the HCPC itself is adequately ensuring the health of the general public, and inhibiting future progression of the paramedic profession.

The labour intensive, under-qualified, transportation perceptions once attributed to ‘ambulance drivers’ and now paramedics, have been shaken off to an extent in recent decades, resulting from rapid change in training, education, professional representation and importantly, registration.

Chung (2001) stated that although emergency medicine is a young and developing speciality, recognised only as such in around 10 countries worldwide, it is rapidly expanding in different directions and has broken the proverbial walls of hospitals to represent itself independently. This was seen none more so than in the mid 1990s, when many paramedics themselves aspired to develop their role into a profession, and for them individually to embrace the notion of becoming a professional (Donaghy, 2008); but one questions what this actually meant for future practice.