We are seeing increasing concerns about the conduct of health professionals towards each other, students and learners and service users.
This relates to the crossing of professional boundaries and sexual misconduct, and involves HCPC registrants as well as other health and care professionals.
Everyone has the right to feel safe and have their boundaries respected. Every dreadful experience that victims or survivors have suffered demands that we apply ourselves to heading off future problems. Sexual violence and misconduct must not be tolerated and we should all call it out.
Christine Elliott
HCPC Chair
Incivility and unprofessional behaviours have a significant and harmful impact on individual colleagues and teams. These behaviours build unhealthy workplace cultures leading to poor service user outcomes.
Sexual misconduct, harassment, grooming and behaviours of a sexual nature can be particularly harmful, causing serious psychological, emotional and physical harm, that can remain long after the abuse has happened.
We are calling on education providers, employers, professional bodies and unions to prevent these behaviours from happening, and to encourage greater reporting when they do occur.
As a regulator of 15 different professions, we also have a role to play in ensuring the professionals we regulate meet high standards of conduct, performance and ethics.
“There is an especially high duty on health and care professionals to speak up and act on concerns about safety and when they witness behaviours that are wrong. It is employers who must show leadership and be role models to create the right culture and safer environments. We, as a regulator, have a significant part to play in informing behaviours through our standards to help protect people and dealing with concerns reported to us.”
Bernie O'Reilly
Chief Executive and Registrar
Our work
We have begun a programme of work designed to raise awareness of the impact of sexual misconduct, and to help improve the sexual safety of service users, those working within health and social care, and the students and learners on our approved education programmes.
This work has included the development of new online sexual safety resources providing important information on the standards expected of our registrants and where to seek help and support if you have experienced or witnessed these behaviours.
Our revised standards of conduct, performance and ethics, which came into effect on 1 September 2024, include new and clear standards on maintaining professional boundaries with service users, carers and colleagues, including on social media.
Our Professional Liaison Service is able to provide learning about the revised standards, the impact these behaviours can have and raising concerns.
Our Insights for employers programme this autumn includes two webinars that will help managers to identify the behaviours that constitute sexual misconduct and understand their impact.
Within our organisation, we have been developing our staff to improve our understanding of what a disclosure of sexual misconduct means and how to respond appropriately to this, as well as developing our understanding of the immediate and long-term effect of sexual misconduct on survivors.
We have also published new guidance for our fitness to practise panels to support their decision-making in cases that involve sexual misconduct and the crossing of professional boundaries.
