The GMC has once again called for an urgent change in the law to enable them to test the language skills and competency of European doctors before they start work in the UK.
In presenting evidence to the health select committee, GMC chief executive Niall Dickson said the regulator needed more powers to be able to properly check the competence of European doctors.
Dickson said: “What we can do is check who they are; we can get from the competent European authority a certificate saying they are somebody of good standing, and thirdly we get the qualifications they produce.
“What we cannot do is look behind those things. We cannot say well that qualification doesn’t mean very much. If it is approved, and it is on the European list, then we simply have to accept them and in the case of Dr Ubani that was of course what happened.”
German doctor Dr David Ubani negligently killed a patient during an out-of-ours visit in Cambridgeshire in 2008. David Gray died after being administered 10 times the normal dose of diamorphine. The coroner, and a subsequent inquiry, raised serious concerns about the management of out-of-hours care.
Health minister Mike O’Brien, who also appeared in front of the committee, questioned whether empowering the GMC was the best way to tackle the problem.
He suggested that greater adherence to existing responsibilities, and better management of the ‘performers list’, by trusts and employers could be the solution.
O’Brien said: “I am making absolutely clear that PCTs should have been by law, since 2004, looking at language skills. They had no discretion on this; it was a legal obligation. They should be doing it now.”
He added: “The most important check, and where we have to tighten up a lot, is on the employer because the employer, either a co-operative or a private company, needs to ensure that the competence in terms of the skill and also the language skills are adequate to do GP services.”
Dr Ubani was employed as a locum GP covering an out-of-hours shift by private sector provider Take Care Now, which recruited him at short notice from Germany.
O’Brien felt that that working with PCTs and employers would be more expedient than changing the law. “If we go into a long drawn-out discussion about changing EU Directives, what the GMC want and giving them new powers…I think it will just take longer, but I want to sort this out by the end of this year,” he said.
Tags: Out-of-hours, Overseas doctors
This was an ‘accident waiting to happen’. Once we lost control over standards of ‘qualifications’ and the right to practise in this country - because of EU regulations - there was bound to be trouble. Of course the Minister knows that he has no power to ‘change the law’ because it is part of the ‘freedom of movement of labour’ within the EU.
I have been critical of the GMC in the past (in relation to revalidation and licences to practise) but, so long as the GMC is the ‘licensing authority’ it MUST be given the powers to ensure that it can deny licences to those it deems unfit to practise - for whatever reasons. But a command of the English lamguage must be an essential requirement for anyone involved in clinical pratice that involves treating patients.
A very sad case, and of course stricter controls should be invoked.
However, one might say that UK GPs (in the main) have been very quick to drop meaningful out-of-hours care. This surely must have a bearing on the hastily-arranged cover of dubious quality, provided by intermediary companies.
If there wasn’t such a deficit of out-of-hours cover in the first place, this would have been less likely to happen.