posted on 2023-06-08, 22:09authored byGwynne Jones, Kenneth Bayley, Linda Christian, Nasreen Hammond, Lel Meleyal, Helen Wenman
The General Social Care Council (GSCC) has duties under Section 19 of the Mental Health Act 2007 to approve Approved Mental Health Profession (AMHP) training. This function will transfer to the Health Professions Council on 31 July 2012. The GSCC carried out a targeted inspection between March 2011 and February 2012 of all 22 AMHP programmes across England. This was to ensure at the point of transfer all courses were sufficiently meeting standards. There had been a number of issues and concerns raised about inconsistencies in the quality of AMHP programmes. The inspection process involved consulting all stakeholders concerned in delivering and using the programmes, including AMHP candidates, service users and carers. Each programme has their inspection report on the GSCC website. The key findings of these inspections are that the majority of the 22 programmes are meeting the standards expected and where they are not, action has been taken to ensure that prior to transfer of the GSCC’s AMHP inspection function, all programmes will meet the standards and not require regulatory intervention. There is inconsistency in the length and attached credit of each AMHP programme, although this did not seem to impair the threshold standard required for being competent in the AMHP role. This composite report features the overall outputs from the inspections.