Looking forward to our launch event

It’s now less than a week to go to the launch event for the Psychological Professions Network.  Clare and I and the rest of the committee have been overwhelmed by the interest shown in the event.  We’ve had over 300 expressions of interest in the event and faced the job of trying to accommodate as many people as we could at the venue.  This has meant we couldn’t give everyone a place and it’s been hard to make these decisions.  What we’ve tried to do is allocate places based on being representative of profession, specialty, geography.  We may not have got it completely right but we’ve done our best.  For people who haven’t got a place or can’t attend, we will be putting all the presentations on the website.  Also, we’d really like everyone to have the opportunity to contribute to the discussions we have planned for the day.  Therefore, we will be making space on the website to enable people to contribute their thoughts and ideas too and also to see what’s been discussed on the day.  Hopefully, we will have our Twitter experts to support this too (I still need to get the hang of this one).

We’ve identified themes for the work of the network.  These are Education & Lifelong Learning, Research & Innovation, Supporting Clinical Excellence and Promoting Psychological Well-being.   We hope that we can develop our knowledge of examples of good practice and excellence from you so we can showcase the really important work that we all do.  We’re also interested in your ideas and how they could be developed and how the network and its members can support development.

We hope that these will help the network develop ways of showing how important psychological approaches are and the range of impressive work going on in the North West.  We want you to share with the network the good things that are going on.  We are also keen to develop and support networks through the website.  We really want this to be your network and owned and supported by all.

On a less serious note, Clare and I have debated about the wearing of purple on the day to coordinate with the network colours.  This is still a work in progress so there may be purple worn either overtly or subliminally.   If you’d like to make it a PPN network purple day then please do but it isn’t compulsory of course.

I’m really looking forward to seeing you all on the day and I know there will be many of you I know and many of you I’ve yet to meet.  I’m sorry I won’t get the chance to have all the conversations I’d like to have but I do hope this will be just the beginning of developing the network and making closer ties between us all – professionally, specialty, geographically.