Reply To: Where the profession is heading…..

[Anonymous]

An item on FB caught my attention last week. The College of Podiatry (the Society education arm) had a vote and decided to drop the “Chiropody” label from their title. This was much-vaunted as heralding a new dawn for UK Podiatry. Will it? Probably not, but lets wait and see.

What annoys me is that the College of Podiatry insist they represent all UK Chiropodists and Podiatrists, when they clearly don’t. They represent the biggest professional body, and can shout the loudest, is all.
Let’s not forget that it was the Society who, in 1968, “saw no reason for properly-trained chiropodists to have access to local anaesthesia. Or in 1975 wanted to limit our use of local anaesthetic to 1% lignocaine. I will also mention an underhand attempt to poach Institute members in 2003.

I concede that one initiative from the Society, that of helping to establish a Faculty of Podiatric Medicine at the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow, has been a good move for the UK profession – so well done to them for that.

However, in spite of all the rhetoric from the Society about being hand-in-hand with the HCPC and the Dept of Health, I don’t see NHS Podiatrists being paid any more. Neither do I see, apart from a few far-sighted individual members of the Society, a genuine desire to bring the three main professional bodies together and accept that FHPs are indeed part of our overall UK footcare profession.

What would make a huge improvement (IMO) to the UK profession is the formation of a national General Podiatry Council where we all had a say in how the profession develops. Until we have a professional bodies balance-of-power change though, that is unlikely to happen, at least in my professional lifetime.

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