Northern College of Acupuncture

General information

We are an educational charity dedicated to acupuncture, Chinese medicine and nutrition science and practice. Students from many different backgrounds and from all over the UK and beyond, train with us and become highly successful practitioners.The College is a learning community built around our large team of teachers of practitioners who love their work and inspire our students and are committed to excellence.

We are located in in the centre of the historic city of York in a beautiful Georgian building on an old Roman and Viking street a few minutes walk from the river.

We place clinical practice at the heart of our work, with students involved in our teaching clinic from the start of their courses, and interactive learning focussed on clinical casework. We also make a significant contribution to research by practitioners. We are particularly proud of our teaching clinics, our library and our friendly and supportive staff.

The Northern College of Acupuncture was founded in 1988 by Hugh MacPherson and Nicholas Haines, when we offered our first acupuncture programme. The College is now a registered charity, and we added programmes in Chinese herbal medicine in 1994 and nutritional therapy in 2008. We see our educational work as being both challenging and inspiring. The challenge comes from learning new ways of seeing and understanding. The inspiration comes from the insights, knowledge and skills that come with fresh perspectives.

Our educational programmes are designed to meet high standards of excellence and quality. They have a focus not just on acquiring knowledge and learning techniques of practice but also on the development of the practitioner. Our aim is to help our students to become balanced and well-rounded practitioners as well as educating them to a high academic level. At the NCA we recognise that professional practice has the complexity and diversity of a rich tapestry. Our programmes follow a structured approach to theory and practice but at the same time we are eclectic in our approaches to diagnosis and treatment and our tutors have wide ranging backgrounds in their own training. By this means our students are enabled to construct a wide-ranging personal repertoire from which they can draw creatively and flexibly to best meet their patients’ needs.

Chinese medicine and nutrition science and practice are fields of knowledge where theory and practice remain closely linked. Their rich bodies of theory and research evidence are applied in practice, but also theory is continually informed and modified by direct clinical experience. We therefore put considerable emphasis on the importance of clinical experience, and early exposure to clinical practice is a key feature of our programmes.

We have a thriving and well respected teaching clinic and dispensary at the College, which is open every week of the year and serves our local communities offering acupuncture, Chinese herbal medicine, tuina Chinese massage and nutritional therapy. This provides a great clinical learning environment for our students at the heart of the College.

We have a strong track record of developing and running programmes leading to both professional and academic qualifications, and we have always been pioneers in the field. We were the first teaching institution of any kind in the UK to offer a University degree in acupuncture (the MSc in Acupuncture with the University of Wales, in 1995), the first to offer a post-graduate degree in Chinese herbal medicine (MSc in Chinese Herbal Medicine with the University of Wales, in 2004), and the first to achieve professional accreditation for our acupuncture, Chinese herbal medicine and nutritional therapy programmes (in 1996, 2003 and 2010 respectively).

Also, back in 1990 we established our sister research charity, the Foundation for Research into Traditional Chinese Medicine (FRTCM), having foreseen the need to carry out robust research into the value of these therapies. The College's teaching clinic collaborated with the FRTCM and Sheffield University on a large pragmatic controlled trial into the provision of an acupuncture service for low back pain. This was the UK's largest ever research study into acupuncture, with major funding from the Department of Health. Patients were followed up for two years after treatment and the results of the trial have now been published in the British Medical Journal1. This research means that acupuncture is now one of the best evidenced interventions for back pain, and it was a key part of the evidence informing the decision in 2009 of the National Institute for Clinical and Healthcare Excellence (NICE) to recommend that acupuncture for back pain should be made available on the NHS.

Over the years, the College has come to be recognised nationally for its work in the field of Chinese medicine. We have regularly recruited up to 40 students every year to our acupuncture programme(s) since the College's inception. These students are drawn from a wide geographical area, mostly from between the north, Midlands and the south of Scotland. Our Chinese herbal medicine programmes have had smaller intakes – up to 12 – as they are open to qualified acupuncturists only, and we have generally recruited a new intake every other year. Our herbs students have been drawn from an even wider geographical area and a small number have even commuted from other European countries.

We also run a range of post-registration courses, providing continuous professional development options for practitioners. These include open seminars and research training.