Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt has announced that every doctor practising
in the UK will be subject to regular checks to help improve the quality of
patient care.
The new system of checks - known as revalidation - will be run by the
General Medical Council (GMC) and is the biggest change in how doctors are
regulated for more than 150 years. Currently doctors may face no formal
assessment of their competency in their entire career.
The GMC will start to tell doctors their revalidation dates from
December this year, and expects most doctors to have gone through the
revalidation process by March 2016. The UK’s 230,000 licensed doctors will be
expected to undertake an annual appraisal with information collected about
their practice, including feedback from patients, doctors, nurses and other
colleagues. Doctors will be expected to demonstrate they meet clinical standards
and have kept up to speed with the latest developments in their field.
All doctors in the UK with a licence to practise will be linked to a
“designated body” which will be responsible for conducting the appraisal.
Concerns raised in pilot appraisals have ranged from clinical competence
to unpunctuality and lack of bedside manner.
According to the GMC, the UK is the first country to introduce such a
system covering all its doctors. To keep their licence to practise, doctors
will be required to revalidate on a regular basis. Once the scheme is up and
running this will normally be every five years. Professor Sir Peter Rubin,
Chair of the GMC says that the introduction of revalidation will make ‘a major
contribution to the quality of care that patients receive.’
‘Responsible officers’ and other medical leaders will be revalidated
first, by March 2013. About a fifth of licensed doctors will be revalidated
between April 2013 and the end of March 2014, the majority of licensed doctors
by the end of March 2016, and all remaining licensed doctors by the end of
March 2018. The GMC says that recent assessments by the Delivery Boards in each
of the four countries of the UK - who are responsible for overseeing the
changes to relevant legislation and regulations - demonstrate that systems are
in place for revalidation.
The Information Daily
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