A Christmas message from our Principal, Richard Blackwell
Our recent NCA Christmas party was a reminder to me of what a delightful group of people work at the College, united in their enthusiasm for our endeavours to educate and support our students.
As a College we have much to be proud of in 2021. As the lockdowns ended, our acupuncture course director and her teaching team were at the heart of our successful efforts to re-open the College and clinic, to enable our students to catch up on their days in clinic and their clinical skills training in class. Our nutrition clinic supervisors Sally, Jenny and Abby, integrated our clinic from being totally online – to offering a choice for clients of online or in person clinic sessions. These achievements contribute to the great morale of our nutrition team, which in turn will fuel our future work supporting our students to succeed and planning new courses. Our herbs teaching teams continued their successful adaptations to the pandemic, and our online MScs team began planning future courses in an increasingly online world.
As part of our efforts to expand clinical training opportunities we implemented a long-cherished plan to open a low-cost multi-bed acupuncture clinic. This has been a great success and the clinic is bursting at the seams with patients! Then in October we were delighted to welcome to the College two new groups of acupuncture students (studying on weekends and weekdays respectively), who in combination are our biggest ever intake of students.
We also held our first Hugh MacPherson memorial lecture, delivered by Dr. Mike Armour in memory of Prof. MacPherson, the first Principal of the College who went on to become a leading light of acupuncture research. The lecture, held online, was a great success with 200 people attending. We are looking forward to carrying forward the momentum with our first online Research Conference in April next year. These achievements contribute to the great morale of our team, which in turn will fuel our future work supporting our students to succeed and planning new course
We wish everyone a restorative and merry Christmas, and a fruitful and happy New Year.
Richard