Reading through the document, section 4.9 is contradictory. it states:
No staff will be compelled to join these registers and employers will not be required to employ staff from these registers, though they could choose to do so. Where providers and those that they provide care for see benefit in employing staff who are nationally assured through a voluntary register, they will be able to do so, either by requiring registration when advertising posts, or seeking a commitment to join a register and training and developing existing staff so that they are able to do so.
Section 4.11 states:
Rather than a single statutory approach regardless of local needs and local approaches, quality assured voluntary registration will provide greater flexibility and give the public and local employers greater control and responsibility for how they assure themselves about the quality of staff. For the overwhelming majority of occupational and professional groups which are not currently subject to statutory regulation and which are generally not considered to present a high level of risk to the public, but where recommendations that regulation should be introduced have been made (including those groups recommended by the HPC for statutory regulation in the past, but not yet registered), the assumption will be that assured voluntary registration would be the preferred option.
This apparently gives the VRCT the green light to carry on albeit with much reduced authority.
What needs to happen now is that we (biomeds) as a whole take the VRCT to task and break it up into more appropriate sections. We need to ditch the "patient facing" technicians i.e. those who operate Gamma Cameras, Inject Radioisotopes, carry out Nerve Conduction studies etc. They can call themselves "Clinical whatever they want". Once we separate the VRCT into clinical and non-clinical sections we can start again. After all, the main reason for combinig what were two completely different professions was to get the numbers up so that the HPC would take notice. Now that is out of the window, the assured voluntary registers can be as big or as small as they want just as long as they can afford to run them, see appendix A of the document.
