The Strange Family of Derek Gale

[Trigger warnings: abuse, suicide]

A bit of context to the following post. About a year ago I started writing a book on therapy abuse. The project foundered due to, well, my own laziness, quite frankly. However, before procrastination took hold I’d gathered a substantial quantity of research materials about a notorious therapist-turned-cult-leader by the name of Derek Gale. What follows was originally intended to be a chapter in the book. I recently dug it out and finished the chapter, so that an awful tale does not remain untold.

No professional register will take you? Just set up one of your own!

One of the arguments against regulation of psychotherapy is that if such titles as “counsellor” or “psychotherapist” are made protected titles, then those who are either struck off or were never registered to begin with will simply use other titles. “Life coach”, for example.

Parallels are sometimes drawn with other professions. Dietitians are regulated, but people get around regulation by calling themselves nutritionists. Likewise podiatrists and chiropodists have protected titles, but some people call themselves “foot health professionals”, and work unregulated. An example of someone using this to get around a striking-off order was shown to me by blog reader Patrick Killeen. It’s a tale that stinks worse than a nasty case of bromodosis.

McCarron case referred to High Court

In May 2014 the Health and Care Professions Council made a heavily-criticised decision not to strike off a clinical psychologist who had been found to have committed serious sexual misconduct. John McCarron was instead given a one-year suspension.

The Professional Standards Authority has now referred the decision to the High Court. The hearing will be on 22nd January 2015. I’m pleased that such a highly-questionable outcome will receive further scrutiny.

More on the McCarron case

Last month I was alarmed to hear that the Health and Care Professions Council had failed to strike off a practitioner psychologist after finding allegations of serious sexual misconduct proved. The full committee findings are now online. I think it raises a few questions about how the panel came to its decision.

John McCarron, a psychologist from Lancashire. was suspended for a year after beginning a sexual relationship with a vulnerable client shortly after the therapy ended. I’ve chatted about the case on Twitter with various psychologists, all of whom have been shaking their heads at what looks like a worryingly lenient decision. I received a few thoughts from Leigh Emery about the sanction.

Psychologist has sex with client, is not struck off by @The_HCPC

I’ve covered various cases where psychotherapy bodies have dealt with therapists who’ve committed serious sexual misconduct by temporarily suspending them rather than permanently striking them off. These have included shocking cases such as Geoffrey Pick, Stuart Macfarlane and Rob Waygood.

There’s a new name to add to this rogue’s gallery, but this time there’s a difference. I’ve argued that such cases mean that counselling and psychotherapy needs to dispense with voluntary self-regulation in favour of a statutory regulator such as the Health and Care Professions Council. However, on this occasion it’s the HCPC themselves who have decided that having sex with a client is not a reason to strike somebody off.

Social Work and Moving On

In a couple of weeks I will be leaving social work. Or will I? I am moving into a job where my social work qualification is not an essential requirement. I am moving away from ‘frontline’ practice in the way that I have always understood and defined it.

Being diligent, I remain registered as a social worker by the HCPC (Health and Care Professions Council) and there is no doubt, therefore, that I can continue to  legally be entitled to call myself a ‘social worker’ but the job I will be doing is not ‘social work’.

I am incredibly proud of being a social worker so it is a shift for me. Of course, as I will be remaining in the sector, my experience will be crucial in the new role but I will no longer be building that same types of relationships on a personal level that I do (or at least I hope to) now. I will be working in a different way.

The next few weeks, then, will be filled with reflections. I am saying a lot of ‘goodbyes’. I have been in my current post for many years and the current council for even longer. I am saying goodbye to the people who are on my ‘caseload’ – some of  whom will be reallocated and some of whom will be discharged from the service. I am trying to get everything done but I know the way life works isn’t about neat closures.

I’m also saying goodbye to a local area I have worked in for many many years. Familiar streets, blocks of flats, estates which have so many faces and memories entrenched in them. There are roads and buildings I can’t walk past without remembering some of the people that lived within them and gave them the flavour and character of a neighbourhood.

I think of some of the people I worked with who had no one else to remember them. Isolated, detached from families by distance, ill-health or circumstance. Then I think of the families I saw, the warmth and kindness and hope within some of the depths of poverty and the tragedies that life can fling at people without recourse to ‘fairness’ or ‘equity’.

I’ve had the honour to work with some immense people who have opened up to me and allowed me to share some of their most difficult moments and I have worked alongside people who have struggled so long and hard with such dignity or pain.

I have put in services and tried to offer suggestions but – increasingly, I have also removed and denied services to those whom I felt would have an improved quality of life if they were provided.

I’ve learnt a lot about the value of good health and knowing ones limits. I’ve learnt enough about the effects of alcohol to turn me near enough teetotal (not entirely mind!). I have learnt enough that even the best planning can’t protect one from accidents or fate.

Ill health affects across all social classes, cultures and belief systems. I have walked into houses which have made my jaw drop, some through opulence and some through squalor. I have tried not to judge but to listen and respond – sometimes it can be predominantly about listening and hearing.

I have had good and not so good managers and feel so fortunate in my current role to work in a very supportive team and organisation so it is with sadness that I see how the cuts over the past couple of years have ripped the heart out of a service and professionals who really were, even if it didn’t always look like it from the outside, trying to do their best.

‘Doing our best’ will not be sufficient anymore. While a government talks of parity of esteem between mental and physical health and further integration or establishing the ‘dementia challenge’ which focuses on better diagnosis, it’s important that we do not allow those who spread the cheap and hopeful words around freely to believe that parity of esteem will not cost. Establishing good and supportive dementia services which focus on what happens AFTER diagnosis will cost and that integration has to involve more change that asking everyone to sit in a room together and do team building exercises.

When I look at adult social work and mental health social work, the two areas I have worked in and I see how things have changed, it is not only this government I look at with despair, it is the previous government too.

Ed Balls played political games with social workers and bought into the Sun criticism in the wake of the tragic death of Peter Connolly. All main political parties have backed the privatisation of care services without building in sufficient protection and until the personalisation agenda actually offers the same benefits to someone with dementia without a supportive family as it does to an independent adult with a physical disability I will see that it is not yet a success.

So I’ve seen a lot of changes but not all bad. I see a great hope in the profession as we can work harder on developing an independent voice that doesn’t need a battling professional organisation which can’t stop its bickering and pettiness or a ‘Chief Social Worker’ chosen by civil servants with no knowledge of what the heart of social work is to ‘speak for us’.

Let us speak for ourselves and find more ways of doing so. Social Work is a profession to be proud of – we just need to make sure more people know about it – and we need to put some more fight into it. Fight politically, fight against cuts which affect those whom we work with, challenge within the organisations in which we work and remember that we need to create and build a profession to be proud of for ourselves – because no one else will.

Not a ‘media officer’

Not a soap opera

Not a fly on the wall documentary

Not a professional organisation

Not a ‘college’

Not a Trade Union

Not a government-appointed ‘chief’

We have to claim the profession back from the narrow definitions that successive governments seem to be forcing us into. Social Work happens outside local government – something I am about to have a far better understanding of.

It’s going to be a weird few weeks for me as I grapple with my own professional and personal identity. I rather feel I won’t give up the fight wherever I go – I hope not. There’s still a lot more to be done.

pic by soraya nulliah @ flickr

Goodbye GSCC, Hello HCPC

The Exciting World of Social Work Registration in England

As of yesterday, I am a registered with the HCPC – (Health and Care Professionals Council ) previously known as the HPC (Health Professionals Council) which took over registration for Social Workers in England from  1st August.

The GSCC (General Social Care Council) which previously held the responsibility for the registration of English Social Workers wound up on the 31st July and is no more.

Out with the Old

The GSCC wasn’t always bathed in glory. It had a very difficult start and while there was a general feeling that protection of title of social workers and the idea of a register was a good thing, the implementation wobbled at times. Initially the GSCC was intended to register all social care workers and it never quite managed that – a wasted opportunity to regulate a sector that in my view, needed it. I also think the ties between social work and social care should have been fortified as it doesn’t necessarily make sense to me to distance ourselves as social workers from social care workers.

It’s worth remembering amid the fond and grateful recollections of the GSCC that it also had significant difficulties in managing the responsibility for regulation and having a potentially dangerous backlog in conduct hearings that potentially had a serious effect on the safety and protection of those who rely on social work services, with Mike Wardle, a previous Chief Executive, being suspended in 2009.

The concept of a professional register is useful and necessary to maintain standards and safety of those who use social work services but did it need to be a specific body for social work itself?

The GSCC did seem to pick up but perhaps the damage had been done in terms of reputation and the growth of the College of Social Work to pick up representative issues and the promotion of the profession and the education of professionals made the reasons for some of the separation less clear.

Students

My reservations remain around the issue of a lack of register for students which I felt was a valuable addition to the GSCC role and the HCPC have stated they do not wish to continue with this but will rather, rely on universities to monitor their students.  As a Practice Educator, I should, I guess have faith in the universities I work with but I see a desire to pass and accept students at all cost.

There is a fundamental difference in the way that social work placements operate that make it more necessitous for social work students than for students in other professions. Social Work placements can be longer and students are expected to be doing clinical work with those who use services independently.  This matter is still in flux and it will be a matter of time to see how it progresses with the Universities taking over responsibility for ensuring their students are fit to practice during placements.

In with the New

The HCPC insists there are advantages about being part of a multi-professional register. For me, the most obvious one will be a system which is devised and embedded to work with multiple ‘fitness to practice’ panels. It is not a reinvention of the wheel. The purpose is protection of public and that is something the HCPC have been doing for a long time.

I don’t need the regulator as a ‘voice’ of the profession – indeed – it was an unusual fit and perhaps only existed as a function in the GSCC because it didn’t exist elsewhere. I’m hopeful the College of Social Work will take shape and prove useful for the profession – but that demands engagement and involvement from all social workers. We have been notoriously bad at joining professional associations and unions as a group but honestly think that the only way we can make, affect and grow the impact of the Social Work is to join and engage with the College of Social Work.

As for the higher fee for registration, personally, it’s not a major issue. It’s not something I have a choice about, it’s not an unreasonable sum of money and I prefer an independent regulator as opposed to a government backed regulator and this is the price I pay.  It’s irritating that I renewed my GSCC registration this year and have to pay again later this year but it’s not something that I’m going to expend annoyance on. I have a job and it’s a price I pay for it. Much better than not being registered!

The way the ‘fitness to practice’ panels will work as against the GSCC standards, I’ll reserve judgement but honestly, if it works for OTs, Art Therapists, Psychologists, Paramedics and many more, I have no doubt it will work for social workers in England too.

So thanks to the GSCC for their hard work in difficult times and hello to the HCPC. I’m sure we’ll get along just fine..