The Pharmaceutical Journal Vol 267 No 7161 p217-221
18 August 2001

This article
Reprint
Photocopy

News summary

Government seeks views on new regulatory council of Health Professionals

The Government has started public consultations on a proposal to create a Council for the Regulation of Health Professionals (CRHP). It does not consider the current arrangements for the accountability of professions, including pharmacy, to be satisfactory. Currently all the regulatory bodies for health professionals are accountable to the Privy Council, with the exception of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society, which the Government says has no explicit accountability to anyone.

A consultation paper says that if professional regulatory bodies are to retain public confidence they must tell people what they do and what they have achieved, allow the public to influence their policies and decisions, prove that they act in the public interest, deal with complaints quickly, effectively and fairly, and ensure that regulation meets the needs of health care providers.

The CRHP will not be expected to regulate health professions directly, but will be expected to oversee the regulatory role of the self-regulating professions and be accountable to Parliament. The proposals on which views are sought cover:

• the functions of the CRHP
• the extent to which responsibility for education, training, continuing professional development, revalidation and fitness to practise should be held by individual professional bodies and the scope of the CRHP’s powers to co-ordinate these
• the nature of the accountability of regulatory bodies to the CRHP
• the accountability of the CRHP itself

The consultation document says that it is essential that professional regulatory bodies should work together to agree common systems across the professions, and standards that put patients’ interests at the heart of professional regulation. It says that it is clear from the experience of recent years that current arrangements are weak and that reform of individual professional bodies is needed. This is combined with a need for stronger, more effective, co-ordination of their work as well as clearer, more robust accountability mechanisms.

It is against this background that the CRHP is proposed to work with regulatory bodies, backed up by statutory functions, to build a new regulatory framework which:

• explicitly puts patients’ interests first
• is open, transparent, and allows robust public scrutiny
• is responsive to change
• provides for greater integration and co-ordination between professions
• requires professional bodies to conform to principles of good regulation
• ensures that they are more consistent

There are 11 proposed statutory functions for the CRHP. They are:

1. to protect the interests of the public
2. to manage the self-regulatory framework and oversee the regulators
3. to report annually on the performance
4. to compare regulators’ performance
5. to set performance targets and monitor progress
6. to require conformity with the principles of good regulation
7. to ensure consistency across regulatory bodies
8. to promote co-ordination among regulators
9. to act as an ombudsman
10. to advise the Secretary of State for Health and devolved health ministers on extending regulation
11. to make public interest appeals in extreme cases

The consultation document is available here. Comments are sought by 30 September 2001.

Back to Top