The Impact of the EuroPsy Project

No other professional group has attempted the use of an agreed framework of standards across a wide variety of European countries. When successful, this initiative is likely to be followed by other professions, not only in related fields, but across the entire economy. Developing practical, robust mechanisms for this will be extremely challenging, but will provide precedents for others to follow. It is therefore important that it should happen within a context which is wider than a single profession or sector, so that the lessons may be disseminated more widely and more rapidly. In addition to her senior role within the British Psychological Society and the European Federation of Professional Psychologists Associations (EFPPA), Professor Ingrid Lunt’s role as Chair of the UK Interprofessional Group (which brings together representatives of all high level professions) provides a particularly important route for dissemination to all other professions.

The project will have a major impact in a number of areas:

• on university level teaching which will follow comparable quality criteria and will benefit from innovative approaches to defining psychologists' competence
• on the public and consumers through the higher quality and comparability of competence outputs of psychologists. Higher standards will enable more interventions at the preventative level, in particular the fields of health and clinical psychology, human factors and safety interventions, school psychology, organisational psychology, forensic psychology which will in turn have an impact of the social and healthcare budget
• on the profession and practice of psychologists which will develop a more transparent definition of occupational standards
• on student mobility
• on employers who will benefit from higher standards of training and competence
• on psychologists' mobility in Europe through the Diploma which is accepted throughout member states and which will bring a European dimension to national training programmes

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