Keep balance over fitness to practise, warns CHRE
Health regulators should not place undue emphasis on the investigation of individual practitioners' fitness to practise, the Council for Healthcare Regulatory Excellence is to tell a Government regulatory review.
The view is set out in a paper (PDF 80K) to be adopted at a meeting of
the CHRE this week after The Journal went to press. The review is being
conducted
by the Department of Health’s director
of workforce, Andrew Foster (PJ, 19 March, p323).
The CHRE takes the view that fitness to practise measures affect few
registrants, although they provide feedback that can help improve other
regulatory functions, such as initial registration, ensuring the maintenance
of knowledge, skills and attitudes, and setting expected standards of
conduct.
It also suggests that consideration be given to bringing all health regulators
together under a single Act of Parliament, rather than use a series of
Section 60 Orders to modify individual regulatory Acts.
Possible advantages the CHRE sees in such a change include accelerating
the pace of change, reducing duplication of effort, increased transparency
and greater harmonisation. Disadvantages include the complexity of drafting
any new Act and the delays it would bring to reforms in the short and
medium term. The CHRE paper does not set out any discussion of the advantages
or disadvantages of Section 60 Orders.
The paper also raises the question of the extent to which promoting a
profession is a regulatory function.
It takes the view that where a regulator’s functions explicitly
include professional promotion, this should be no more than promoting
the understanding of the profession by the public. However, the paper
acknowledges the existence of the alternative views that regulators should
have no promotional role at all or that they should actively promote
their members’ ability to fulfil health care needs. |
The
Pharmaceutical Journal
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