Final Report > Chapter 25: Competent Healthcare Professionals > The Council for the Regulation of Healthcare Professionals

The Council for the Regulation of Healthcare Professionals

75 Regulation, as we have defined it, therefore, extends from entry into a profession, to continuing in it, to ensuring that competence is up to date through revalidation, to processes of support for improvement and, if that fails, to removal from the register. The purpose of the system of regulation must be to assure the public of the competence of healthcare professionals and, when necessary, to protect them. As such it needs the widest involvement of professionals, of the principal employer and of the public. It cannot achieve its purpose if it is a system which is designed and operated solely by particular professionals for their professional peers. Nor can it achieve its purpose if it is solely a matter for employers within the NHS. An effective system of professional regulation must be owned collectively. Further, it needs an independence from the professions and from government which allows it to act in the public interest. In short, we see a need for a single overarching view to be taken of education, training, development and discipline of all the healthcare professions. This role as we suggested earlier could and should be played by the body proposed in `The NHS Plan' (the Council of Healthcare Regulators), which we believe should be more accurately named the Council for the Regulation of the Healthcare Professions. Thus, for each group of healthcare professionals (doctors; nurses and midwives; the professions allied to medicine; and managers) there should be one body charged with overseeing all aspects relating to the regulation of professional life: education, registration, training, continuing professional development, revalidation and discipline. The bodies should be: for doctors, the GMC; for nurses and midwives, the new Nursing and Midwifery Council; for the professions allied to medicine, the reformed professional body for those professions; and for senior healthcare managers, a new professional body. Each of these bodies would be represented on the new Council, as would representatives of the NHS and the general public. It should be established as soon as possible with a broadly based membership as we have indicated. All of the existing bodies which regulate the healthcare professions in one respect or another would be members. It would provide the unifying principles and the co-ordination necessary to ensure that the various bodies, and there are many, all serve the needs of the public. The Council will of course draw on the skills and the expertise of these bodies, the Royal Colleges, the professional organisations, the trusts and the NHS. But it will be independent of all and have a strong element of public participation. We believe that the Council should have statutory powers to require the various bodies to act in the interests of patients and conform to principles of good regulation. It should also seek to ensure that in practice the bodies regulating healthcare professionals behave in a consistent and broadly similar manner. The Council should, in our view, report to and be accountable itself to Parliament. In the future, regulation of the healthcare professions must be seen in the round and organised accordingly.