Compulsory training and induction programmes for doctors who have never worked in England before are among measures being examined in a government safety review following the case of a German doctor who accidentally killed a patient on his first out-of-hours locum shift in this country.
Also under discussion is the creation of a national database that would allow NHS organisations and private providers to check whether applicants for GP work had failed in previous attempts. Employers could also find out more easily whether doctors had formal warnings or disciplinary restrictions on the work they could do when they moved from different parts of the country.
Measures to standardise the ways local NHS trusts check applicants’ standard of English and medical competence are being studied too as part of a broad review of out-of-hours work being led by David Colin-Thomé, the Department of Health’s director of clinical care, and Steve Field, chairman of the Royal College of General Practitioners who has already championed such measures. The General Medical Council, the profession’s regulator, says it is willing to hold the data nationally. Ministers would have to approve the package.
The GMC is also stepping up its campaign to change rules for recognising medical qualifications across the EU. It wants doctors from Europe to face tests on their knowledge and skills before being added to the professional register in this country, just like doctors from other parts of the world, but a European commission review of the rules is not planned until 2012.
Read more at The Guardian.
Tags: Overseas doctors, Training
This case demonstrates one of the (many?) weaknesses of the ‘free movement of labour’ within the EU. It is quite clear - and must surely have been known to those in the ‘regulatory bodies’ - that the standards of medical education and training vary considerably throughout Europe, particularly the Eastern European countries formerly under communist rule. It is also fundamental to the practice of medicine that there must be a ‘common language’ so that there is adequate ‘communication’ between doctor and patient. It may well now be very difficult for either the GMC, or indeed our Government, to try to impose new regulations for the practice of medicine in this country that would recognise these realities!