ICP threshold policy

The Threshold Policy provides a new approach to the investigation of, and decision making on, cases in the early stages of the fitness to practise process. This approach will also ensure that serious and high risk cases are identified earlier and prioritised through new ‘gateway’ decision points in the process. The health policy explains how we will investigate concerns that a registrant’s fitness to practise may be impaired by reason of their health. It sets out the factors that we will take into account when assessing these cases, and the types of health information we may seek to obtain during our investigation. Both policies can be found on the Resources pages of our website here: https://www.hcpc-uk.org/resources/

The changes to our case investigation processes and decision-making criteria will be evident at the Investigating Committee panel stage in the following ways:

• You may see more cases where a health allegation is raised alongside other allegations relating to conduct, competence or conviction/caution.
• All convictions or cautions, no matter how serious, will now reach our threshold criteria and will be referred to an ICP for consideration. You may therefore see allegations relating to lower-level offences that previously we would have closed internally.
• The Case Investigation Report will now include information about any current Interim Orders in place on the registrant and any relevant fitness to practise history that the registrant has. The new Case Investigation Report form is being phased in from 14 January and you may see both old and new versions of the form in use for the next few weeks.

Cases that raise a serious concern will now be streamed on receipt and managed by a dedicated team. A core aspect of the new threshold policy is that these cases must proceed to an Investigating Committee for a decision, and cannot be closed internally.

Where the threshold has been met, in any case, the matter must proceed to the Investigating Committee for consideration. In some cases, we may find that we are no longer able to draft an allegation after the threshold has been met, because the nature of the evidence we have has changed significantly such that it could no longer amount to an allegation. For instance where a registrant is charged with a serious offence but the charges are later dropped or they are found not guilty. We do not anticipate that this will happen often.

As we cannot close these cases internally, we will bring the matter to the ICP to ask for the panel’s decision on how we should proceed. We will be making a recommendation to the panel to close the case. Panels have the prerogative to reject our recommendation, and to decide that allegations can be formed from the information in the bundle. If a panel disagrees with our recommendation the case will be return to us for formal allegations to be drafted and the registrant will have their usual 28 day period to provide formal observations before the allegations are put before a new panel. If that happens, we ask that panels provide clear reasons for why they consider allegations can be formed from the information available or for any further investigation route they consider is available. Our approach, and the investigative steps we have undertaken, will be set out for the panel in a bespoke Case Investigation Report. We will provide further guidance to support panels in considering these cases during February and March.