The Honorary Psychology Role: 7 reasons it sparks debates

Dr Marianne Trent (: 00:00

Unpaid yet seemingly essential, controversial, yet coveted. Picture this aspiring psychologist navigating a landscape where experience often comes at the detriment of actual compensation. But why the buzz around honorary assistance psychologist roles? What secrets do they hold? Why are they so unethical? Join me for today's episode of the Aspiring Psychologist Podcast where we unravel the enigma surrounding these positions and delve right into the heart of the debate. Stay tuned and I hope you find it so useful.

(: 00:45

Hi, welcome along to the Aspiring Psychologist Podcast. I am Dr. Marianne Trent, and I'm a qualified clinical psychologist. Now recently on my LinkedIn and on my Instagram, I am Dr. Marianne Trent. In both of those places where I said, what gives me the ick and the answer was advertising of honorary assistant psychologist post, and it's true, it does. It feels a bit yuck. Before we dive into this episode where we're exploring the seven reasons why honorary assistant positions are controversial, let me quickly take you through a little bit of definition about what I mean. So typically an honorary assistant psychologist position would be one where somebody might be working in a hospital or a clinic or a research setting, usually supporting qualified psychologists to deliver a service that they provide. The roles of an honorary assistant psychologist might be conducting assessments, supporting with admin tasks, scoring assessments, starting to make a start on writing letters, maybe collecting data, sometimes even administering interventions like therapy groups alongside hopefully qualified staff.

(: 02:04

But unlike formal assistant psychologist roles, these roles are unpaid. So what we are not talking about necessarily here is a separate debate. We're not talking about placement student roles, we're not talking about master's placement roles. We're not talking about undergraduate sandwich, year placement roles, which can be quite common, and I understand that they are not paid. But for me, this issue is when you see a company advertising honorary assistant psychologist roles. So yeah, it is a whole different debate. The unpaid placement, which helps you then get your qualification that you are obviously paying and wanting to develop. That is not really the main topic of this podcast, although very important debates too, what we're talking about is people asking for people to come into their service and work for free doing highly skilled work. That's what we are discussing today. So with no further ado, let's look at reason one, why this is a controversial hot potato.

(: 03:18

Well, it may not surprise you that I'm leading with this first reason, and that is exploitation of labour. You might well see this in NHS settings, and I'm starting to see it crop up in private practise as well. Some people feel fiercely protective of the fact that this happens in NHS services, but it still isn't okay, asking people to come and work for you for free to travel to and from your work base to buy their own lunch to often to pay their own parking. It's not all right. It's not all right to the person doing that role. It's not all right to the people who cannot afford to do that role. Some people might say It's only a day or two a week, it's fine. It's like, well, it's not fine because that's actually a big chunk that's 20 or 40% of what could be their full-time equivalent salary.

(: 04:17

And I am concerned that it creates the context where free labour is part of the service that's built in. We're allowing staffing needs to partly come from free labour, and that's not okay. That's not okay because this is important work that we're asking people to do. It's exploitative and my relic is when you see it in private practise where people are actually charging money, it's allowing the qualified psychologists to earn more money because they're not having to pay a virtual assistant or they're not having to do the role themselves. It's not okay. It's stinky. I'm not all right with it. And of course, what we know in certainly NHS organisations is that we still need our honorary or voluntary staff to be trained. And so you get the position of inequity where you might well be sat next to a band 9, a band 8d band, whatever, psychologist who is perhaps new to the trust as well, doing their mandatory training and knowing that they're getting paid quite a nice wedge of money and you are getting paid zero and gone are the days where you often get free lunch.

(: 05:35

So there's not even the perk there massively exploitative. So point number two is inequitable access. This is creating gaps for those who can or can't afford to pursue their career in psychology. So of course, those who can afford to work in honorary capacity might be likely to be younger. And I know that actually a big chunk of my podcast listeners are actually a little bit older. So some of my most popular episodes certainly on YouTube have been those that feature older applicants. So I know this matters. I know this is important. And what we know is that of course, these honoree assistant roles do actually help people's career. If we're only allowing people to get a bump start if they can afford to work for free, that means we are discounting people who are parents. We're discounting people who don't have maybe parents to let them live with them for free or to take reduced rent.

(: 06:31

We know we're discounting so many different types of people and we're giving the red carpet treatment with the Gold Spangled banners to people who can afford to work for free. So yeah, it's just that inequitable access. It's the platform not being level for all that makes this so unjust. Point number three is access to supervision and professional development. Now, as an honorary member of staff, you're not always really counted in the numbers. People often don't even really know your name. They might well talk about you behind your back as the honorary, you're seen as more transient and you might not regularly have access to supervision. You may feel like you are having to chase people for supervision because probably there's not really the job plan hours of time to be able to supervise you because this is probably something that's been thought of as a stop gap to plug gaps in the service, not necessarily something that's been thought about in any great detail.

(: 07:35

And it's often thought about to plug gaps in the service rather than to further your own development and think about how well contained and supported you feel. One AP who listens to the podcast told me that they had left an honorary assistant psychologist position because they felt the management was really horrendous and that it meant that somebody who condoned this level of honorary role went out of their way to recruit and appoint to it was less likely to rally for change and to think that that job was worthwhile and that that person deserved to be paid for doing that role. So there's something around the services and the supervisors who are condoning these honoree assistant psychologists roles. Without that proper supervision, without appraisals, you're not necessarily going to develop in the same way as you would as if you were in that paid capacity. Perhaps you're not getting access to the training courses that would help further your development, but that your paid counterparts might well be getting access to.

(: 08:44

And of course, what we know is that not all honorary roles are classed or counted in the same way as paid roles by people screening applications. And of course, if you're not doing that honorary role full time, it can take really quite some time to score the adequate days, months, years to be able to get what looks reasonable on your cv. So yeah, just to summarise on 0.3, it's just that you are not feeling like you're being treated the same as other people. You're not being afforded the same time for supervision. You're not being afforded the same time for development, and that could hinder you, that could hold you back. Point number four, we'll be coming up after this short break

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Jingle Guy (: 09:39

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Dr Marianne Trent (: 10:18

Welcome back. So in the first half of our episode, we were looking at the first three reasons why honorary assistance psychologists posts can be so controversial, so let's dive back in and have a little look at point number four. So point number four is that this normalisation, this seeing honorary assistance, psychologists posts being advertised and kind of continuing and perpetuating the treadmill of honorary assistance. Psychologists being present in services means that we become acquiesced to that, that we perhaps more likely to just accept it and not fight for change and not fight for these positions to become paid if we're continuing to deliver the services. Of course, public services are very important. I'm not saying they're not, but people and human development is also really, really important. And some people are saying, well, we can't run this service without honoree assistance. Maybe we need to start voting with our feet and saying no to supervising honorary assistant psychologists and saying no to delivering interventions with people who don't have the privilege of being paid.

(: 11:37

It's just a basic right, isn't it? You do a job, you do a day's work, you get paid for it. So the more and more we see these posts advertised, the more and more they will continue to happen. And so perhaps we need to buck the trend of this normalisation, start putting boundaries in place and start saying no. So 0.5 is the ethical considerations. There's ethical considerations around for honorary assistant psychologists as well. So if they're working in private practise, do they have their own indemnity insurance? How are they coping with any moral or ethical dilemmas that might crop up? Things like confidentiality boundaries, tricky questions that you might get asked by clients. Do they have the necessary training skills, expertise, supervision to be able to do justice to that role and to the service that they're representing? And do they have the relevant number of hours supervision with somebody who's looking after them and looking out for them?

(: 12:45

I think that's a really important consideration. Are they seen as a person or are they just seen as someone to help support the service? Are they getting invited to team lunches? Are they getting to spend time shadowing other members of the team, not just doing the role you want them to do? It's an ethical and moral minefield. So point number six is the impact upon diversity and upon the profession. When we advertise honorary assistant psychologist roles, we are often advertising for people who are already psychology graduates who would technically be capable of fulfilling perhaps a band four, a band five NHS paid assistant role, and we're asking these people to work for free. Often there is the essential criteria and the person spec requirements of basically the same as a paid role, but we're saying, could you maybe just do that for free if you do work in the NHS or you have experience of working in the NHS, if you consider for a moment the admin teams and often the complexity of work that you're asking admin staff to do will be meted out to them by their supervisors based on the qualifications and the expertise level of that person.

(: 14:06

Now, if you think about the work that might be done for you by a band four or Band five admin member of staff, what I'm sure we won't find is people doing honorary band four or band five admin roles because they are seen as highly skilled and experienced admin workers, and yet the same does not seem to be true for highly skilled and experienced qualified psychology graduate. We're asking for the same person, the same job description as if they were being paid, but of course they're not. This is something I was chatting about with Gavin Clark, who's joined us for two recent podcast episodes, one on distance learning masters and one on navigating psychology from a wheelchair. He was sharing with me that in the legal profession, honorary roles are really, really common, and it seems that psychology are learning from that, but it's not okay.

(: 14:57

And I feel like in the legal profession, people should know more about morals and ethics, and we don't want to be continuing and perpetuating this narrative that it's acceptable for psychology graduates to work for free. It's not okay. We need to start taking control saying, no, we need to stop advertising these roles. So in terms of the impact on the profession, we are undervaluing the role that these honorary assistant psychologists personnel are doing for the service, and we shouldn't be. Again, if we look at the kind of inequity of this situation, we look at how the diversity of the profession is being impacted upon. It might well be only certain demographics who can afford to do these roles, and so we're perpetuating perhaps the white middle class young aspect of psychology. Point number seven is self-belief. So if someone has only ever been paid zero pounds and zero pennies for their work and not had adequate supervision and felt like they had to chase for containment and support, they may well actually be going into interviews for paid roles, feeling that they're not quite good enough or that they haven't had the time spent enriching them that they deserved.

(: 16:18

They may feel less experienced or less able or capable than people who have been in paid roles compared to them. So this could really knock them. It could really impact on them and their self-belief, and that's our final point, that's our 0.7. If they go into these honorary assistant roles thinking that it will further their career, but actually knocks their confidence, that could then hinder their professional growth and development. So to summarise, these honorary assistant roles are a little bit different than placement roles, which are usually sourced and supported by universities. We've been talking today about services that are advertising, purposefully recruiting to honorary assistant roles. We need to think more about the person. We need to think more about the equity. We need to think more about what we might be able to do to rally the change, to stop this happening. We need to think more about this and the impact it has upon people, upon teams, upon services, and upon the career and professional development as a whole.

(: 17:27

We need to stop exploiting people in our profession, and I know it's difficult if you are looking to get your foot on the rung of the ladder for your next career move in psychology, but perhaps we need to call upon you to stop applying for these roles because I created a role for myself as an honorary assistant. I've been quite open about that in my book, the Clinical Psychologist Collective and in the podcast in the past. Previously too. It did help me. It helped me to get to grips with psychology terms. It helped me to get a feel for what I should and what I could be saying and thinking and doing. It helped me be able to say, I'd done this, I'd done that, but it helped me more than it helped the service. I would say in that example, and this still wasn't okay, it did help me to get my first paid role, which wasn't in that service.

(: 18:24

It wasn't a completely different service and a completely different organisation. I'm not saying they're not helpful, but I'm saying it's not ethical. I'm saying it's not fair, it's not right. And as we do learn and grow and develop in our career, we can make different choices than those which we've made in the past. People contact me all the time several times a week to say, Marianne, is there anything I can do for you? Can I do some honorary assistant work? Can I come and do a placement with you? And I say, no, because I don't think it's fair to them. I haven't yet got a predictable way of being able to help make someone's experience useful to them, but also useful to me in a way that it can help me to increase my revenue to then be able to pay them, and I'm not willing to have people work for me for free.

(: 19:20

I don't think that's how it should work. I'm in the business of building up aspiring psychologists of equipping them with all of the resources they're going to need to hopefully live a really prosperous, enjoyable career. As a psychologist, I don't want to be ill equipping or stripping away what they think about themselves or their capabilities or their abilities. And if I'm going to make money out of something that somebody has done or if it's going to help me to deliver a service that then means I can charge money, I think that that ought to be being passed on to the people that are supporting that role as well. I think everybody working in an assistant psychologist capacity, supporting and enabling qualified psychologists to do their job more efficiently, more effectively, and in services where money is being exchanged. I believe people should be paid, but also even in services such as the NHS, which where they are free at the point of delivery, there is still money involved.

(: 20:20

This is still essentially supposed to be a profitable business. So staffing costs and looking at commissioning of the services, what are we commissioning for? Are we asking for adequate staffing to run our therapy groups, to be able to do our assessments, to be able to support the admin roles surrounding paid psychologists? This is such a big and important discussion. I would love your thoughts on this. Please do come along, follow me on socials, connect with me, get involved with the posts that I mentioned on Instagram and on LinkedIn. Please do come along to the Aspiring Psychologist Community Free Facebook group. Let me know what you think to this. If you're watching on YouTube, please do subscribe. Please do like engage with the content. Let me know what you would like more of from me, and if you find the things I talk about useful, please do consider checking out the Clinical Psychologist Collective book, the Aspiring Psychologist Collective book. And if it's your time and you are ready for the next step, please do consider joining the Aspiring Psychologist membership, which gets really wonderful reviews. Thank you so much for trusting me to help you with your understanding of psychology and developing your career. I love creating this podcast for you. I will look forward to bringing the next one to you from 6:00 AM on Monday for the MP three version, and usually the weekend before on YouTube. Thank you so much for being part of my world and stay kind to yourself if you're

Jingle Guy (: 21:52

Psychologist with this podcast.