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This conference provides an opportunity to explore the effects of demands for a shift from an ethical framework for the professions to a functional framework of behaviour regulation. This shift has meant that practitioners should no longer be trained, supported and trusted to work ethically, but must be held to account for a specific promise of ‘good behaviour’, demonstrating their adherence to uncritically defined notions of ‘good character’. Where ethical positions seek to guide them to develop a relationship with their patients/clients appropriate to the specific and individual work undertaken, the new proliferation of codes of conduct assert how they should behave, what they should or should not do in any situation and even what they should or should not feel.
What may be lost to professions by the equation of ‘ethical practice’ with a prescription for ‘good behaviour’? Can an authentic professional relationship be guaranteed or even encouraged by enforcing adherence to a definition of ‘good character’ or ‘fitness to practise’ that claims to be underpinned by an objective universality? Would subscribing to this model commit professionals to a practise that is fundamentally ill-equipped to respond to the unknown, the contingent and the unpredictable — in other words, to human life itself?
CONFIRMED SPEAKERS
Mary Clark-Glass
Public protection not punishment: the Health Professions Council’s modern approach to Fitness to Practise.
The talk will set out how the HPC disciplinary processes work, and will emphasise why protection of the public, upholding of professional standards and the need to maintain public confidence in the professions regulated by the HPC are the paramount considerations of the panels hearing disciplinary cases.