Closing and reopening for business

Lisa Collins

Member: Shropshire

I had been watching the situation first in China and then as Covid hit Europe from December onwards. I don’t know why but a sixth sense told me this one was going to be serious.

On the other hand, I had spent the last 12 months saving and paying for a week’s skiing with friends in France. Having not been since before my now 13-year-old daughter was born, I was desperate not to miss this holiday of a lifetime. That was February and we did manage to get away – tooled up with sanitiser, seven adults and six children got very experienced at using hand gels, hand washing and not touching anything very quickly, and we did have a great time!

But when an acupuncture colleague closed her clinic in the second week of March I decided I too needed to take action. Ahead of many, I closed my clinic on 16 March as it just felt like the right thing to do.

The wonderful weather and the first rest in probably 30 years meant that I never allowed myself to worry about not working, except for the fact that I was waiting for the BAcC to give us advice… who in turn were waiting for government advice. I was also waiting to see if my local authority would catch up.

I still didn’t feel particularly concerned until I had the real shock of receiving an email on 1 April from my local authority advising ‘As you hold a skin piercing registration you are carrying out an activity that was required to close for business as of the 23rd March until further notice’. This was the moment when I decided to take action. I didn’t mind being shut down because of the disease and potential for it to be passed on from close contact but I did object to being classed under the description of a tattooist rather than a healthcare worker. Especially when on further investigation I could see that chiropractors and osteopaths were still able to work as 'other health professionals’.

I must confess that at this point I was becoming really quite frustrated by the apparent lack of advice coming out of BAcC. Little did I know how hard they were working in the background making sense of the situation. In retrospect, I will always be grateful for the huge amount of work of just a few people within the team to help us get back to work. Plus, they did this whilst also allowing us members to go onto a reduced membership fee. So whilst they were beavering away in the background, I was about to add to their workload.

I wrote to the BAcC to advise them that I had been given a stop notice. I think I may have been one of the first as they did respond with surprise, although I then read that other members were also dealing with similar. I was lucky because instead of going it alone and having to do the research and write the lobbying letters, Mark Bovey and Jennifer Norton picked it up and handled it for me. On 22 May they wrote to my local authority making representations that acupuncture should be classed as skin piercing for healthcare.