Address
168 Hobsons Lake Drive
Suite 301, Unit 4
Beechville, Nova Scotia, B3S OG4
Work Hours
Monday to Friday: 9am – 5pm
Weekend: Closed
Submit a Complaint
The Massage Therapists’ Association of NS is a voluntary association of Registered Massage Therapists (RMTs), dedicated to protecting the public, serving its members, and promoting the highest possible quality of massage therapy practice. MTANS achieves this mandate, in part, through its professional conduct process.
The Professional Conduct Process consists of two stages:
- The investigative stage, which is overseen by the Investigations Committee; and
- The Discipline stage, overseen by the Discipline Committee MTANS recognizes that having a fair, robust, and efficient professional conduct process is critical in ensuring that members of the public receive safe, ethical, and competent massage therapy care.
Professional Conduct Process
The role of the professional conduct process is to:
- Investigate, consider, and evaluate the merit of complaints of professional misconduct, conduct unbecoming the profession, incompetence, and incapacity, made by members of the public, members of the profession, or the Executive Director regarding the conduct or actions of current or past members of the Association.
- Deal with all complaints in a fair, objective, through, and timely manner.
- Determine the appropriate course of action with respect to those complaints.
Where possible and appropriate, the professional conduct process will attempt to rehabilitate the respondent and consider systemic issues which have contributed to a complaint.
Investigation Committee
The Investigation Committee may do any one or more of the following:
- Dismiss the complaint and provide any guidance the Investigation Committee considers useful to the complainant, the respondent, or any other person associated with the complaint.
- Informally resolve the complaint.
- Caution the respondent.
- With the respondent’s consent, order that the respondent receive a reprimand.
- With the respondent’s consent, impose conditions on the respondent’s membership.
- If a determination is made that the matter or matters before the Investigation Committee are appropriate for the Fitness-to-Practise Committee and the respondent consents, refer the matter or matters to the Fitness-to-Practise Committee.
- If a determination is made that the matter or matters before the Investigation Committee warrant a hearing, refer the matter or matters to the Discipline Committee. In addition, the Investigation Committee has a role to play with resolving matters through Settlement Proposals.
In addition to the Investigation Committee’s Policies, all persons involved at the investigative stage of a complaint are subject to common law requirements requiring them to adhere to fundamental principles of procedural fairness and natural justice.
There are various requirements of procedural fairness during the investigative stage of a complaint, which include providing the respondent to a complaint (the RMT) with enough information to respond to the complaint. In everything it does, the Investigation Committee must act fairly, objectively, and impartially. The Committee members must be free from actual bias, and any reasonable apprehension of bias. Potential members of an Investigation Committee panel must declare any conflicts of interest prior to serving on a panel.
Recognizing that the Investigation Committee is an investigative body, it does not make findings of fact or findings of credibility. It can, however, weigh all the information it receives to determine the likelihood of establishing professional misconduct, incompetence, conduct unbecoming or incapacity.
It is important to note massage therapy is not currently a regulated health profession in Nova Scotia, so any and all disciplinary actions made by MTANS can only be enforced within our membership. Meaning, if MTANS has made a disciplinary decision to put limitations on one of our members, or remove them from our membership, the therapist could legally choose to continue working in Nova Scotia without affiliation to a massage association. We cannot stop a person from practicing, only from practicing as an MTANS member.
If you feel your interaction with a therapist was in violation of the law (e.g. theft, fraud, sexual abuse, physical abuse or emotional abuse) please contact police in your area.