Writing, training, teaching, researching, consulting, quality assurance and the kitchen sink

This chapter describes the author's involvement in training, teaching and researching health psychology. The author considers the realm of psychology politics and quality assurance to be inextricable. Quality assurance is political, whether we like it or not. Today's standards are tomorrow's bad ideas, very often. Similarly, some of today's good ideas are tomorrow's standards. The more one becomes involved in quality assurance, the more one appreciates that judgements of quality do not exist in a vacuum, but rather are made in social and economic contexts. The author believes that the present day health psychologists can make a difference to the lives and careers of tomorrow's health psychologists and they have the power to make health psychology engaging and exciting, and equally we can turn it into an outright chore.