PAConline at UKATA Nottingham 2026

By John Paradise, Certified Transactional Analyst (P), PTSTA(P), UKCP Reg. Psychotherapist  - on behalf of the PAConline team 

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Setting the scene 

PAConline is an online directory of qualified psychotherapists and counsellors, built by practitioners for practitioners. I’m John Paradise, UKCP-registered, PTSTA(P), and one of the practitioners behind the platform. Day-to-day I work clinically in Exeter and teach at the Wyvern RTE; PAConline is what occupies the rest of my attention, alongside a small team who bring the technical, design and operations skills this kind of project demands. 

What we’re building is deliberately small. Not in ambition, but in posture. We’re a boutique, not a corporate matching engine. Every practitioner who joins has been spoken to, their credentials hand-checked, their listing shaped in dialogue with us. That posture matters in the work, and we wanted to be at UKATA Nottingham to say so in person. 

Why this conference 

UKATA isn’t a conference of strangers for me. It’s the professional community I’ve belonged to for years, and the body whose ethical framework I trust most for the question PAConline tries to answer well: how do clients find a therapist they can actually work with, on a platform that respects both sides of the encounter? 

Sponsoring the 2026 conference in Nottingham was a way of being properly visible to the TA community, not as a corporate sponsor passing through, but as colleagues building something. That UKATA was the first conference we chose to sponsor was deliberate. 

Alignment with the sector 

The online therapy space currently gives clients two doors. One is a directory. Long lists, light or no curation, the practitioner left to do all their own outreach. The other is a corporate matching service. Algorithmic, fee-heavy, designed first for shareholder returns and only second for clients or clinicians. 

Neither feels right to us. The directory model under-serves the client; the corporate model under-serves both. Practitioners we’ve spoken to describe being squeezed on fees, having their professional judgement displaced by a questionnaire, and being asked to compete in a system that strips away the relational texture that makes therapy work in the first place. 

PAConline sits in the gap between the two. Curated, but not algorithmic. Visible, but not extractive. Fair to the practitioner. Easy for the client. 

Key themes 

The themes that resonated most with us in Nottingham this year were the ones already alive in the TA community: relational ethics, the place of evidence, and the changing client experience of online work. What stood out, conversation after conversation, was how strongly practitioners value a platform that refuses to flatten their judgement. 

Value of sponsorship and presence 

Being a sponsor allowed us to do something a website launch can never do: stand alongside the community for three days and listen. Not pitch, not demo … but listen. We came back with more practical refinements to the platform from that one weekend than from any three-month period of internal review. 

Insights from the floor 

What practitioners want, in our reading of the room, is fewer middlemen and more transparency. They want platforms that help the relationship form, then get out of the way. They want regulatory bodies represented accurately and not collapsed into marketing badges. And they want a directory that takes the same care over its own ethics that they take over theirs. 

We came home with a long list of small calibrations and one large confirmation: the architecture we’d been building toward availability-first search, hand-checked practitioner profiles, clear regulatory signposting, no client-side matching algorithm is what this community wants too. 

Challenges and opportunities 

The biggest challenge facing the sector, in our view, is the slow erosion of clinical judgement by automation. Many of the larger platforms have moved decisively toward questionnaires and algorithmic matching, and we don’t think that’s where good therapy comes from. The opportunity is to build the alternative. Calmly, slowly, and well. 

Measuring success 

Success for us isn’t volume. It’s the proportion of practitioners on the platform who’d recommend it to a colleague, and the proportion of clients who feel, at the moment of first contact, that they’ve already been treated with care. Both are slow metrics. We’re comfortable with that. 

Looking ahead 

Over the next twelve months we’ll move PAConline from its current beta into full operation, bring session delivery into the platform itself, and continue listening to UKATA, to BACP, to NCPS, to clinicians on the ground, and most of all to the clients the platform exists to serve.

A closing thought 

A therapy platform doesn’t have to behave like a tech company. The work is relational. The infrastructure can be too. 

— John Paradise, on behalf of the PAConline team