Consultation: Professional Boundaries Guidance
The General Chiropractic Council (GCC) is holding a consultation to gather insights and views on proposed Guidance for Registrants on Professional Boundaries.
The General Chiropractic Council (GCC) is holding a consultation to gather insights and views on proposed guidance for registrants on Professional Boundaries. This consultation opened on 1 October 2025, and will close at midnight on 31 October 2025.
What is the consultation about?
The new Code of Professional Practice (2026) comes into effect on 1 January 2026 and includes changes to the standards expected of chiropractors in relation to professional boundaries.
During the development of the new standards, we identified that our current guidance (from 2016) is narrowly focused on sexual boundaries and does not consider emotional or financial boundaries, or boundaries of respect and dignity.
We have prepared new guidance to more accurately reflect the standards within the Code of Professional Practice (2026).
Read the documents
The new guidance highlights the need to maintaining respectful personal and professional boundaries with patients and colleagues. It covers:
- The new knowledge-based requirement to recognise power imbalances and their impact
- Unacceptable behaviours, and their impact on individuals and patient safety
- Expectations when a patient or colleague crosses a professional boundary
- improper relationships are not confined to sexual boundaries but also encompass financial and emotional relationships
As an independent statutory body accountable to Parliament, we are legally required (as part of the public sector equality duty) to consider how the proposed guidance may affect different groups of people, particularly those who are vulnerable, have lived experience of barriers to accessing care or services or have characteristics protected by equality legislation.
Separately, we also have a legal duty to comply with the Welsh Language Measure and must consider the impact of the proposed guidance on opportunities to use the Welsh language.
Our consideration are published in the Equality and Welsh Language Impact Assessment.
Read the Equality and Welsh Language Impact AssessmentWe have a legal duty to comply with the Welsh Language Measure and, when consulting on a policy matter must consider the impact of the proposed guidance on opportunities to use the Welsh language. In order to do this effectively we produce both the proposed guidance, and the Equality and Welsh Language Impact assessment in the Welsh Language:
Proposed Guidance for Registrants on Professional Boundaries (Welsh language version)
Read the Equality and Welsh Language Impact Assessment (Welsh language version)
While not part of the consultation documentation, you may also be interested in our research into patient attitudes to professional boundaries, which we published in January 2025.
Read our previous research
How to respond to the consultation
If you would like to comment on the consultation, please complete the online consultation questionnaire:
The consultation questionnaire consists of five sections:
- About you and your interest in chiropractic
- Your views on the proposed GCC Guidance for Registrants: Professional Boundaries.
- Your views on the proposed Equality and Welsh Language Impact Assessment.
- About you (optional Equality and Diversity monitoring)
- Final Comments
At the bottom of each page you can save your progress in the questionnaire and return to it at a later date.
You are able to print or save a copy of your responses as a document (for your own records) at the end of the consultation.
If you cannot complete the online questionnaire, you can also download and complete the PDF version of the questionnaire and send it to enquiries@gcc-uk.org before the closing date.
