18 December 2018
Dear colleague
From everyone at NRCPD, we wish you a merry Christmas and a happy new year.
If you have questions about anything in this newsletter, please don't hesitate to contact us. You can also follow us on Twitter and like our page on Facebook.
Kind regards
Kate Price
Registration Service Manager
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The office will close at 1 pm on Thursday 20th December, and we will reopen at 9am on Wednesday 2nd January.
I wanted to take the opportunity of the Christmas festive season to bring you all up to speed with our plans and achievements. But first I want to acknowledge the hard work and commitment of our registrants, whether highly visible supporting BBC productions or in Theatre or conference work or the unseen and crucial work in health, social care and in criminal justice. We owe it to you to further the cause of effective national regulation and have done much in 2018 towards that. We have recruited new staff to bring our core services in-house, we have delivered the first stage of our IT project to time and under budget and this has included launching our new dedicated telephone number which everyone is now using successfully. We have some new Trustees on the Board and have appointed an Honorary Treasurer providing a crucial financial oversight role. We decided, exceptionally, not to increase registration fees for 2019.
We have used a variety of fora to advance the public protection case for NRCPD as the sole independent regulator - we believe strongly that this is a principled case worth driving home. The public sector in particular should demand NRCPD registered professionals for its language needs in order to properly fulfil its obligations to the D/deaf and deafblind communities. We know the professions want this - more and more join our registers with a total of 1551 at the time of writing, our highest ever and up from 1428 at the end of 2017. We are stronger for this, have a powerful voice and will redouble our engagement work on your behalf in 2019. If you want to play a part in this please let us know.
We constantly work to improve what we do and regularly seek the views of the professional associations and of other professional regulators on best practise in this field. This independence and objectivity ensures that our approach to standards and complaints can be trusted always to be in the interest of the D/deaf and deafblind communities and at the same time fair and supportive of the high professional standards our registrants value. We have much planned towards this in the coming year. In 2019 we will complete the review of CPD and CPD audit; review the complaints process; work with awarding bodies to bring relevant qualifications in line with the National Occupational Standard for Interpreting which was revised in December 2017. We will be more accessible and listen to what people tell us: our program of roadshows starts in January with an event in Glasgow; we will attend a number of partner conferences; we will be launching our largest ever survey which will go out in stages to a wide range of stakeholders to seek views on all aspects of NRCPDs crucial public protection work. We will complete our IT project to upgrade our infrastructure and at the same time implement the Trusted Charity quality standard. And we will invest further in our staff team to build our capability - dealing with people is the single most important thing we do and I want to make sure that every element of customer service maintains care and respect for the individual, the standards of the professions and fairness of process.
Also, we will be flexible enough to make sure we take advantage of new opportunities that come along to expand our routes to registration, support and advise others in developing training and will happily come and speak to any audience about our important work.
So NRCPD remains the ambitious and trusted independent regulator for all communication support professionals. We moved very quickly in the last year to professionalise the service and will continue to do so through 2019 so we deliver the service our registrants and the D/deaf and deafblind communities expect and deserve. Everyone here at NRCPD wishes you all a very merry Christmas and happy New Year.
