Reply from the ministry of health regarding Acupuncture as a reserved act

Dear Ryan,
Sorry that I was unable to get back to you earlier. The proposed Reserved Actions Regulation will be posted on our website for review prior to being finalized by government: http://www.health.gov.bc.ca/leg/index.html

The former Health Professions Council was an arms-length advisory body established under the Health Professions Act. It was dissolved at the end of 2002. The Council had two main functions (1) investigate applications by practitioner groups seeking designation as a health profession, and (2) consider any matter involving any health profession referred to it by the Minister.

In 1994 the Council was tasked with a comprehensive review of health professional legislation and scopes of practice, and submitted its report ‘Safe Choices: A New Model for Regulating Health Professions in British Columbia’ in March 2001. The Council made extensive recommendations for updating the legislated scopes of practice of 15 health professions and adopting a new ‘shared scope of practice/reserved actions’ regulatory model.

In response to the ‘Safe Choices’ report, government made amendments to the Health Professions Act (HPA) in 2003 that enable implementation of the regulatory model. This model is characterized by two essential elements: scope of practice statements and reserved actions.

Scope of practice statements are the concise descriptions, in broad, non-exclusive terms, of each regulated profession's activities and areas of professional practice. These statements describe in general what each profession does and how it does it. They are not exhaustive lists of every service the profession may provide, nor do they exclude other regulated professions or unregulated persons from providing services that fall within a particular profession’s scope of practice.

Reserved actions are a narrowly defined list of invasive, higher risk activities that must not be performed by any person in the course of providing health services, except members of an HPA-regulated profession that has been granted specific legislative authority to do so, based on their education and competence. Individual professions will be granted a list of specific reserved actions from the ‘master list’ as appropriate to their education and comptencies, which may be performed while providing the services described in their respective scope of practice statements. The same reserved actions may be granted to more than one profession. Not all professions will be granted reserved actions. Unregulated individuals or classes of individuals may be exempted from the prohibition. The 'master list' and any exemptions will be established by Cabinet regulation.

This approach abandons the obsolete notion of ‘professional exclusivity’ in which legislation prohibits any person other than a member of the profession from performing certain services or procedures, except where another profession is also specifically authorized in legislation to perform them. Under the new model, many aspects of the scope of practice of each health profession may overlap, or be shared, with those of other health professions, and may also be performed by unregulated persons (to the extent that no reserved actions are involved in the service). This approach is expected to reduce professional ‘turf protection’, support more multidisciplinary practice and improve consumer choice, while maintaining patient safety and public protection.

Linda Gee