Recent posts
Jason Hepple, 2016. Letter from the Chair of ACAT. Reformulation, Summer, p.5.
I am pleased to welcome you to the second edition of Reformulation under the care of the new editors Nicola and Louise. I am sure that you will find it informative and clinically focussed and my thanks to them for steering Reformulation into calmer waters.
It has been a busy year for ACAT, particularly the Quinquenniel Review (QQR) of us by UKCP / HIPC. This is a major inspection of our trainings and governance, and ensures our continued status as an Organisational Member of UKCP allowing our trainings to modularise towards UKCP registration. The paper work that we have submitted runs into literally hundreds of pages and I cannot thank Anna, Dawn, Shirley, Sue and Charlotte enough for the huge amount of time and expertise they have put in. As I write, we are due to meet the inspection team tomorrow. I anticipate that we will be encouraged to introduce five yearly ‘reaccreditation’ for our psychotherapist members, but that need not be as frightening as it sounds and is really a way of firming up our procedures around CPD auditing and the information we collect at membership renewal. We will keep you posted on this. We are also likely to be asked to improve our equality and diversity monitoring and look at accessibility of our trainings. Fortunately, Hilary Brown has just taken on this role for us and this will be a very valuable development that we embrace. Fingers crossed for tomorrow and I will keep you updated.
Liz McCormick, Ruth Carson and myself have been developing our outreach work using CAT understanding to help reflect on conflict in a variety of settings. We have been encouraged by how easily basic CAT ideas are taken up by participants from HR departments, family mediation lawyers and senior managers in health and social care. Last week I did a session with police negotiators at Somerset and Avon police headquarters. This was a fascinating experience. What is the dialogic position of a negotiator (not of course neutral but relational and capable of positive and unhelpful enactments)? How can it be possible to ‘find a safe place to talk’ in such a highly charged situation? How can we use the idea of the super-addressee? We are doing a workshop on this topic at this year’s conference so please join us if you are interested.
I am looking forward to this year’s conference in Exeter University and hope to catch up with many of you there. Prof. Eugene Mullan is welcoming us at the beginning of the conference and I am pleased to say that, with his support, we hope to pilot the first embedded foundation level course in CAT within the Exeter D.Clin.Psych. course, starting this autumn. This is a very exciting opportunity for CAT to be a core approach across the country among clinical psychologists and will hopefully encourage more research into CAT in the future. In 2017, we are planning to host the international conference in the UK in collaboration with ICATA and are currently looking for an attractive venue. The provisional dates are 21st – 23rd September so please pencil that in as it is always an added buzz to welcome our CAT colleagues from literally all over the world.
Rhona Brown has recently taken on a role for ACAT to develop our social media presence so I hope you will consider following us on Twitter to keep up to date and continue the dialogue!
Have a good summer and I hope to see you in Exeter.