Just over a year ago, I found myself sitting with a friend having one of those conversations that, at the time, feels entirely ordinary. We were chatting about what might come next for us, and I was voicing how over the previous couple of years, my work had taken me to London more and more frequently. I felt incredibly grateful for the opportunities that had opened up and helped me develop my career , but I also noticed something else stirring underneath the gratitude. Wales had become so much more than the place I happened to live. It was where I had trained as a psychotherapist, where I had rebuilt my life after trauma and developed lifelong friendships and professional relationships. It was where I had slowly begun to discover what kind of therapist, supervisor and educator I wanted to become, and I felt like I wanted to bring my focus back professionally to this place that had given me so much.
The following morning, I opened my emails to find NCPS advertising for a Wales Representative. Life has a funny way of providing sometimes doesn’t it.
Over the past year this role has introduced me to remarkable people, invited me into conversations taking place across Welsh mental health services and policy, and reminded me that advocacy is so often made up of small, persistent acts rather than dramatic moments. Much of the work happens quietly, through meetings, relationships, emails, conversations and introductions that most people will never see, yet those quieter moments often create ripple effects that reach much further than we ever imagine.
One of the first challenges I stepped into last summer centred around something that had frustrated me ever since I began training as a counsellor almost a decade ago.
Several organisational members contacted me because funding bids were being rejected where services planned to employ NCPS accredited counsellors rather than BACP. Immediately, I recognised the rhetoric because I had heard versions of it throughout my own training. Back then, it was almost accepted as fact that if you wanted opportunities within the profession you “had to be BACP.”
Except it isn’t true.
Both NCPS and BACP are Professional Standards Authority accredited registers. Both meet nationally recognised standards designed to protect the public. Both represent highly skilled, ethical practitioners. Yet outdated assumptions are still creating barriers for therapists and, ultimately, for the communities they hope to serve. For me, this was never simply about professional bodies. It was about choice, accessibility and fairness. Therapists should be free to join the accredited register that best aligns with their values, the way they practise and, importantly, what is financially accessible to them. Different organisations contribute different strengths to our profession, and diversity within professional membership can only strengthen what we collectively offer.
What made this issue feel particularly important was the impact it was having on organisations delivering frontline mental health support here in Wales. One example that stayed with me was Mothers Matter CIC, an incredible organisation supporting women and families within their local community. They wanted to recruit practitioners who lived locally, understood the communities they served and, in many cases, brought valuable lived experience alongside robust professional training. Several of those practitioners happened to be NCPS accredited. Despite often being the strongest candidates for the role, outdated commissioning assumptions risked excluding them before they had even been considered.
The irony wasn’t lost on me. Here were practitioners who had chosen an affordable, member-led professional body, often because it reflected their own values and circumstances, only to find that choice limiting their employment opportunities.
It also seemed to sit in direct contrast to the Welsh Government’s Mental Health and Wellbeing Strategy 2025–2035, which places equitable access to mental health support at the centre of its vision for Wales. If we genuinely want services to be responsive to local communities, then surely we should also want organisations to recruit the practitioners who are best placed to support those communities.
After raising these concerns with local government leaders and council representatives, I was delighted that we were able to achieve a positive outcome, with confirmation that PSA accredited registers, including NCPS, should be recognised appropriately within commissioning processes. On paper, it may appear to be quite a small piece of advocacy. In reality, I felt it represented something much bigger.
It reminded me that policies and procurement processes are never abstract ideas. They shape who gets employed, which organisations survive, who clients are able to access, and ultimately whether people receive support from practitioners who truly understand the communities they live within. I feel like some of the most meaningful change begins not with grand campaigns, but with someone quietly asking why something is still being done in a way that no longer serves people. And if there are questions like this to be raised, you can bet I’m there asking them!
Alongside advocacy work like this in the role, I’ve had the privilege of attending a number of cross-party meetings at the Senedd, where professionals from across Wales come together to discuss the future of mental health support and the challenges facing our communities. These meetings have offered something I hadn’t fully appreciated before stepping into the role. They have provided opportunities not only to raise the visibility of counselling and psychotherapy within wider conversations about mental health, but to build relationships across sectors that too often operate separately despite working towards remarkably similar goals.
When commissioners, charities, researchers, clinicians, policymakers etc find themselves sitting around the same table, something interesting begins to happen. We stop talking solely about our own organisations and begin seeing the wider landscape together. Knowledge gets shared. Partnerships hopefully begin and assumptions are challenged. People discover that someone else has already been wrestling with the very problem they’ve been trying to solve, and perhaps has some insight on it.
Mental health has never belonged to one profession alone, and I continue to believe that the stronger our relationships become across Wales, the better we are able to support the people who rely on all of us.
Throughout the year I’ve also attended a range of Welsh conferences, impact reviews and networking events, each one providing another opportunity to better understand the incredible work already taking place across the country.
One event that particularly stayed with me was Mind Cymru’s Annual Impact Review. Listening to the breadth of projects currently being delivered across Wales, particularly those focused on young people’s mental health, community resilience and reducing health inequalities, was both inspiring and reassuring. It reminded me that whilst the challenges facing mental health services are significant, so too is the commitment of the people working tirelessly to improve them.
It was through one of these events that I had the pleasure of meeting Selima Bahadur from EYST (ethnic minorities and youth support team). The conversation we had that day highlighted experiences that, despite working in trauma for many years, I knew many therapists rarely have the opportunity to hear about directly, and here was an organisation with a mission to research and raise awareness of these vital issues. As a result, a few months later, Selima joined us as the guest speaker at our first Welsh Regional Connections event. Her presentation explored the hidden lived realities experienced by refugees and asylum seekers here in Wales and invited us to think more deeply about racial trauma, belonging, displacement and identity. What followed was a wonderfully rich discussion. Members shared reflections from their own practice, spoke honestly about their own lives or areas where they still wanted to learn, and remained deeply curious throughout. Reading the feedback afterwards was genuinely heartening. Again and again, people spoke about how valuable it had been simply to have space for that conversation and for me, that captures so much of what this role has the potential to be. Sometimes the greatest contribution isn’t having all the answers, but simply creating spaces where thoughtful conversations can happen safely, connecting members with people doing important work across Wales, and trusting that what is learnt together will ripple outwards into countless therapy rooms, organisations and communities.
Alongside these events, I’ve continued building relationships across both the public and voluntary sectors, as well as with organisations providing mental health support throughout Wales. Those relationships are still growing, but they already feel incredibly promising. My hope is that they will continue strengthening opportunities, visibility and support for NCPS members whilst ensuring our profession has a stronger voice within wider conversations about health, wellbeing and prevention.
One of my personal highlights this year was delivering an NCPS Lunchtime Learning session exploring therapeutic work with mixed-race clients.As someone who is mixed race myself, this is a subject that sits close to my heart and I’m deeply grateful to belong to an organisation willing to champion conversations around identity, intersectionality and anti-oppressive practice, recognising that these are not niche interests but central to providing ethical, culturally responsive therapy.
More recently I attended the Welsh roundtable for the Commission for the Future of Counselling and Psychotherapy, where practitioners from across the country came together to explore the barriers, opportunities and future direction of our profession.
Many of the themes discussed echoed conversations I had already encountered throughout this role. Accessibility emerged repeatedly, with concerns around the cost of training, unpaid placements, accreditation fees and the additional barriers faced by disabled practitioners, those from lower-income backgrounds and many people from underrepresented communities. Workforce sustainability also featured heavily, alongside discussions around fair pay, paid placements, stronger career pathways and greater recognition of counselling and psychotherapy within health and social care. Unsurprisingly, I found myself thinking that these conversations weren’t separate from the advocacy work I’d already been involved in. They were simply different expressions of the same question. Who gets to become a therapist? Who gets to remain one? And who ultimately gets left behind if we don’t address the structural inequalities that continue to shape our profession? Those questions resurfaced once again when I attended a presentation from the Mental Health Foundation exploring findings from their latest Welsh report. Much of what was presented felt entirely consistent with what I’d been hearing throughout the year.
The Mental health foundation wales report highlighted that Wales is currently experiencing the highest levels of mental health inequality across the UK nations, with financial hardship emerging as the strongest driver. Around one in four adults in Wales have experienced poverty-related stigma, whilst almost a third of Welsh children are growing up in households living below sixty per cent of the UK median income. These aren’t simply statistics to be discussed within reports, they describe the realities shaping the lives of the people arriving in our therapy rooms every day. What particularly resonated with me was the report’s call for greater investment in prevention, including a dedicated budget for preventative mental health support. Throughout this role I have repeatedly met organisational members delivering exactly this kind of preventative work, often supporting communities long before difficulties escalate into crisis, yet doing so with increasingly limited funding whilst managing ever more complex client presentations. It seems to me that if we genuinely want to reduce pressure on already overstretched mental health services, then prevention cannot continue being treated as an optional extra. It deserves recognition, sustainable investment and a place at the centre of policy conversations rather than around their edges.
As I reflect on this first year its lovely to recognise the relationships that have developed along the way between organisations, practitioners, policymakers and frontline professionals. Between communities that perhaps hadn’t previously had opportunities to learn from one another. This feels like the real work because systems rarely change overnight. They shift gradually through trust, collaboration, curiosity and the willingness to keep showing up, even when progress feels slower than we’d like.
Looking ahead, one of my priorities is to introduce quarterly online Regional Connections events so that members can stay connected with what’s happening across the Welsh mental health landscape. My hope is that these sessions become somewhere I can report back on the policy conversations, research, opportunities and developments taking place across Wales, whilst also creating space for members to raise questions, share concerns and tell me about the realities of practising where they are.
Perhaps most importantly, I want this role to continue evolving alongside our members rather than ahead of them. Advocacy should never be something done on behalf of people without listening carefully to what they actually need. Whether you’re newly qualified, working in private practice, employed within an organisation or still finding your place within the profession, I’d genuinely love to hear from you. The conversations I’ve had with members over the past year have shaped this role just as much as any meeting I’ve attended, and I fully expect that to continue.
I’m incredibly grateful to NCPS for trusting me with this position and to every colleague, organisation and member who has welcomed me into conversations throughout this first year. Its important to me to remain a voice for NCPS members in Wales. The therapists trying to build sustainable careers in a profession they care deeply about, the organisations working tirelessly to support their communities despite limited resources, the clients whose lives are shaped not only by personal experiences but by poverty, discrimination, isolation and the wider systems they exist within.
Thank you to everyone I’ve worked with this year and please reach out if you’d like to connect. Diolch!
