The Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC) has released the revised standards of conduct, performance and ethics and guidance on social media which sits alongside them.
The changes will come into effect from 1 September 2024.
A regular review of the standards of conduct, performance and ethics is essential so that HCPC can ensure the standards are relevant to current practice, incorporate equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) commitments and are clearly understood by those who use them.
Consultation phase
The revision of these standards follows a consultation which ran from 27 March 2023 until 16 June 2023. It included consultation workshops and engagement across various stakeholder groups.
We received 218 responses to the consultation.We received 190 responses (87%) from individuals and 28 responses (13%) from organisations. Of the 190 individual responses, 161 (84%) were HCPC registered professionals. We also had over 200 people attending our consultation workshop series.
You can read more about why and how we revised the standards.
Key changes
The main areas of change to the standards are:
- equality diversity and inclusion;
- communication,
- duty of candour;
- upskilling and training responsibilities; and
- managing existing health conditions and disabilities in the workplace.
Find out more on these changes
We have also updated our guidance on social media. In this guidance we explain more about how registrants can meet the requirements on social media when using professional and personal accounts. When registrants use their personal accounts, they should be mindful of the impact their posts may have on their professional practice and their profession.
Sustainability was also discussed in the consultation. However, a standard on sustainability was not included in the consultation in this review cycle.
We will be updating our online materials to provide resources on practising sustainably. We will also be discussing sustainability as part of our review of the Standards of Education and Training in 2024.
Webinars
In the lead up 1 September 2024, we hosted workshops and developed explanatory materials for registrants and external stakeholders, to support them in understanding the revisions to the standards and what it means to them.
You can view the outputs and recordings for these sessions below:
- Wednesday 1 November, 6pm – 7.30pm – Public webinar
- Monday 6 November, 3pm – 4.30pm – Webinar for students
- Tuesday 21 November, 2pm – 4pm – Webinar for employers (joint with English language proficiency)
