Plans for a new sanction against doctors called an ‘agreed statement of concern’ should be scrapped because a pilot has failed to demonstrate its effectiveness, defence bodies claim.
The agreed statement of concern is intended to be a voluntarily accepted sanction offered by responsible officers, who will make recommendations for the relicensing of doctors under revalidation reforms.
They would be offered for concerns not serious enough to call into question a doctor’s fitness to practise but they could be viewed by the general public. The sanction was previously called a recorded concern, when first proposed by the CMO in 2006.
Dr Hugh Stewart, head of case decisions at the MDU, said an expert group had concluded that agreed statements of concern offered no added benefit to the regulatory process.
“We are pleased this is the case because we think agreed statements of concern would be counterproductive in terms of getting doctors involved in remediation and we have concerns about the whole fairness of the process.
“We cannot see how they would be helpful because the GMC already has the power to issue warnings before going through fitness to practise procedures.”
Dr Stephanie Bown, director of policy and communications at the MPS, said they also “wholeheartedly” opposed the introduction of agreed statements of concern. “We have never seen any positive value of this sanction and if they are dropped that would be a good thing.”
The agreed statement of concern was modelled alongside a pilot of GMC affiliates, another proposed new layer of regulation. GMC affiliates would be medical and lay individuals, working at regional level, who would bridge the gap between national and local regulation and improve the resolution of complaints.
A KPMG evaluation found the affiliates model received strong support from those involved but would be very expensive to implement - up to £7.4m to set up and up to £4.6m to run each year. The cheapest version would cost a minimum of £1.4m to set up and £2.2m a year to run.
MDU’s Stewart said they had not been persuaded of the necessity of introducing GMC affiliates and this opinion had not changed having seen KPMG’s evaluation of the pilot.
MPS’ Bown said the pilot had shown that GMC affiliates were helpful to responsible officers in bridging the gap between the national regulator and the local employer but the huge cost of rolling the model out could be a problem. “It might well stop it dead in its tracks,” she said.
Tags: Revalidation
