Reforming Regulation Of Healthcare Professionals: A Step Forward?

What does the future hold for the regulation of healthcare professionals?

The government's recent response to the consultation it ran on reforming the regulation of healthcare professionals - 'Promoting Professionalism, Reforming Regulation' - marks a further step towards changes which are designed to make fitness to practise processes more flexible and efficient, including bringing the powers of the existing statutory regulators into closer alignment and giving them more freedom to decide for themselves how they operate.

Some of the more seismic proposals of reducing the number of regulators - or even having one overarching 'super regulator' - have been put on the back-burner for now. Nevertheless, some notable reforms will be carried forward.

We look at what's now being proposed and what we can expect next.

What changes are we likely to see?

With the current model of professional regulation often seen as overly bureaucratic and adversarial, the government has set out its latest plans for addressing this.

The changes the government plans to press ahead with initially include:

Giving all statutory regulators consistent powers to deal with fitness to practise cases more flexibly/efficiently - Currently, the 9 UK statutory regulators of healthcare professionals - General Medical Council, Nursing & Midwifery Council, General Dental Council, General Optical Council, General Chiropractic Council, General Osteopathic Council, General Pharmaceutical Council, Pharmaceutical Council of Northern Ireland and the Health & Care Professions Council (which regulates 16 different professions) - do not have a consistent range of powers to manage fitness to practise issues. For example, whilst some regulators (e.g. GMC and NMC) have introduced case examiners who can, with the registrant's agreement, make decisions about measures needed at the end of the investigation stage without the need for a full hearing, others do not currently have the power to resolve cases without a hearing - e.g. in HCPC cases, if the investigating committee determines there is a case to answer, the matter will proceed to a final hearing without the opportunity for the HCPC or registrant to reach agreement on how the matter may be resolved satisfactorily beforehand. With 72% of those who responded to the consultation agreeing (and only 6% disagreeing) with the need to address this, the proposal is therefore to give all the regulatory bodies a single, broadly consistent set of powers...