Acu. | Issue #34 | Spring 2022
Community
27
On reflection Member and chair of the BAcC and Governing Board, Pia Huber, offers her insider view on current matters of organisational business and governance
Coming back from a longer than usual Christmas and New Year break I jumped straight into a meeting with my mentoring group a couple of days before I saw my first patients in the new year.
Pia Huber BAcC/GB Chair
The group was formed when I was finishing my training as a mentor and supervisor out of a few participants of the training and has now been going for four years. In this nurturing, non-judgemental environment we have grown closer through our exchanges and discussions of successes and challenges of clinic cases and situations, and the built trust means we all feel that we can be open about what is arising in our working life. Listening is the most important ingredient, deep listening. I am finding that honing this fabulous skill serves me well in many other areas of life. Of course, it is also a key skill in our clinics. We ask questions and we listen to what our patients tell us and how they tell their story, and we listen to their sound and their pauses. When I started chairing meetings at the BAcC I had already seen some great examples of how conducting meetings could be done well. I noted that one of the key ingredients is to listen to everybody present and to invite everyone else to do the same. I am sure we have all sat in meetings which were unhelpful, boring or infuriatingly useless, but they can also be productive and inspiring. The Governing Board (GB) meetings are invariably packed full with agenda items that need to be noted and discussed, and some items need scrutinising and eventual decision making. My resolution for the new year is to improve how we conduct our meetings in order to provide enough good listening time and good discussions for important items. At the end of last year we welcomed two new GB members, Sarah Major (practitioner) and Julie Stone (lay). Lay directors are appointed by the Board and chosen to bring in special outside expertise rarely found in our membership. Practitioner directors are usually nominated and then elected by BAcC members in the run up to the AGM. However in this case, we had a sudden vacancy arising when sadly, Paul Blacker stood down very shortly after last year’s elections and the AGM had taken place. Rather than leaving this position vacant for almost a whole year we decided to fill it. In previous years and in similar circumstances we have been able to call upon candidates who have stood unsuccessfully in the recent
elections, however in September 2021 only Lianne Aquilina was nominated and duly elected. Instead of making a direct appointment, as the BAcC memorandum and articles allow, the GB decided to go back to the members for nominations and then appoint one of the candidates by interview, according to the skills and experience we felt would best complement the present composition of the Board. We appointed Sarah Major on a temporary basis and on condition that she will have to stand for ordinary election at the next AGM in order to continue in her role for a full term of three years. Any change of Board members invariably leads to a change of dynamic. I look forward to this new mix of expertise and the continuing development of our Governing Board. I hope to find we have some new and great listeners as well as challenging voices in order to provide good directive forces for the BAcC. Supporting members to work safely and with top class skills is an important part of the BAcC’s work. The high educational standards ensured by the British Acupuncture Accreditation Board (BAAB) – who are funded mainly by the BAcC – have certainly given us an advantage in our standing next to professions who have statutory regulation. The NHS website recommends that patients seek acupuncture from suitably trained health practitioners who are statutory regulated but then specifically links to the Professional Standards Authority register where the search directly refers to the register of BAcC members. A further very important aspect of the work of the BAcC is to promote acupuncture in general. We are entering the year of the Water Tiger, a year it is said to be good for building teams and getting back into creative projects. Let’s go!
