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British Reform Medical Boards
Doctors are losing the power to police themselves
Clare Dyer, legal correspondent
BMJ
The British counterpart to America's state medical boards is the General Medical Council. It has turned the tide on the ability of healthcare professionals to police themselves. The General Medical Council in Britain is losing the right to decide whether doctors' misconduct makes them unfit to practice. This is the biggest shake-up of medical regulation in the United Kingdom in 100 years.
The GMC will continue to set standards and investigate allegations
of serious misconduct by doctors, but the right to adjudicate
will pass to a separate body, probably an independent tribunal
with legal, lay, and medical members.
The reform is outlined in a white paper on the regulation of doctors issued this week by Britain's Department of Health. The paper envisages a smaller GMC, with equal numbers of lay and medical members, ending the era of professionally led regulation. Members of the GMC and the other health professions' regulatory councils will be independently appointed by the Appointments Commission "to dispel the perception that councils are overly sympathetic to the professionals they regulate."
The government published with the white paper its responses to a
series of inquiries into medical scandals—involving the serial
killer GP Harold Shipman; the bungling gynaecologist Richard
Neale; and three doctors who were found guilty of sex abuse of
patients over many years (Clifford Ayling, William Kerr, and
Michael Haslam).
The proposals include better support for patients who register concerns, coordination of information from different sources, and more rigorous checks on references and qualifications when health professionals are recruited. |
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