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Regulation of Health Care Staff in England and Wales

Regulation of health Care Staff is on the march and will affect or restrict many MTOs much more than many currently realise.

“This consultation document sets out proposals for extending regulation to those staff who have a direct impact on patients and have the potential to compromise public safety if their work or behaviour falls short of acceptable standards.”

That's many of US Under 58? Time to get registered!! It will get harder

Bill

http://www.dh.gov.uk/Consultations/LiveC...&chk=BmXrIe

“Aspirant healthcare professions
24. Significant progress has been made towards extending statutory regulation to more professions who
aspire to regulation. The current position is set out below.
• Operating Department Practitioners and Applied Psychologists. Both professions applied
for regulation by the Health Professions Council in 2003;
• Healthcare Scientists who have professional qualifications including Clinical Perfusionists
and Clinical Physiologists. These groups may begin to be ready for regulation by 2005 – if standards of training and practice have been sufficiently well developed by then;
• Psychotherapists and other practitioners of “Talking Therapies”. The Department of Health is continuing talks with the organisations concerned to try to agree a way forward for regulating these groups, but has accepted the need for regulation.
Timetable
25. Subject to final decisions to be taken in the light of this consultation, statutory regulation could be put in place for assistants and support staff by 2007 though it would take some time after that for all those staff groups agreed to achieve registration. A provisional timetable is: • Consultation on proposals March to July 2004;
• Analysis and final decisions August 2004;
• Develop preparatory infrastructure necessary for statutory regulation:
• standardised training or induction requirements as basis for registration, based on national occupational standards projects due to complete in 2004/5
• accreditation and roll out of training if needed
• identification and initial voluntary registration
• code of conduct, performance and ethics – all complete by end 2005;
• Draft legislation, publish and consult from early 2006;
• Pass legislation by late 2006;
• Register and full regulatory system open by early 2007 (for a specified period until proposed
staff groups achieve registration).
Conclusion
26. The Government is committed to increasing public protection and improving quality in health care
settings. This document seeks views on the way in which regulation should apply to health care support
staff. In particular your views on these proposals and the specific questions raised in the text, and
summarised at Annex A, are sought by 2nd July 2004.”

Bill,
I was surprised this week to find a technician working for 4 years in a medical electronics dept who had no idea about the voluntary register / professional registration.

I do not blame him for not knowing, it is the responsibility of managers to get the message across. There are still departments out there who appear to be 'out in the cold'.

We need to find ways to get through to these people.

Exactly what benefits do you get from the voluntary register. It just seems to be taking money from you without helping in any way (I thought that was the union's job )
What will be the criteria for registration when it becomes mandatory e.g. qualifications, training, experience?

The main point of the voluntary register is to prove to the relevant bodies that there is a demand and that technicians are interested in state registration. If no one joins the voluntary register then the case for registration would not be considered due to lack of interest.

The principal of registration is fine but there are still too many unanswerd questions as to how this would work in practice. Especially how this would affect recruitment is smaller EMBE departments which are not part of a larger Medical Physice establishment. Even voluntary registration is not that easy. One of my tchnicians tried to register but did not have an IPEM/Physicist sponsor ( There is no Medical Physics Departhemt here in York.) His application was refused. Since then none of us have bothered. Two of us are already registered with the Engineering Council through our IEE / Chartered Engineer status (£100+ per year). Several others are IEIE or Incorporated. We see ourselves primarily as engineers who work on medical devices with skills which are transferable to other (non medical) potential employers. If all the emphasis for qualifications and registration is focused on the medical part of our work we may be limiting carrer options rather than enhancing them. As for the voluntary register - I can understand a one-off fee but what do registrants get for an anual fee other than their name on a list?

Graham

I think the answer to your question "what do we get for registration ?" is in the long term, permission from the employer to open up medical devices & work inside them.

For far too many years the qualification for rummaging around inside medical equipment was a set of screwdrivers and the ability to deny everything convincingly if something went horribly wrong.

Groups of staff would fiddle with equipment and keep no records whatever. If asked where their records were they would simply ask "Why keep records?"

Over the years I have met some seriously frightening individuals who have opened up equipment and done the most stupid things simply because (a) they had the tools and (b) nobody in the hospital had the power to prevent them.

Many years back I had an attempt at stopping a group of unqualified staff from doing what they flatteringly referred to as "maintenance", only to have a senior clinician come down on me very hard. My line manager got scared and asked me to knock it off.

Some trusts have good equipment management and have had it for several years, some still don't. The essential thing will hopefully be that if you aren't registered you aren't allowed. In other words you will need to have evidence of competency (on paper)in the relevant area of medical technology to practice.

Go onto any ward and ask a senior nurse if you can borrow a screwdriver for a few minutes. You may be surprised at the number of tools that appear. Then go back and ask for a syringe and some drugs and watch their response. See what I mean?

For a middle aged tech like me registration is of course a bit worrying. My ancient City & Guilds certificates and a lack of any Physicist to support me may end up ruining my career, but I really do think the poor old NHS needs to get proper controls on who's allowed to do what.

Marc

All of our techs got onto the register and we are not part of a large med phys dept. Not sure why that is an issue. We registered early on in the process.

As I understand it, one of the main benefits of joining the VRCT is that it is thought that it will make it easier to transfer to the register when it comes in. It is a 'when' rather than an 'if'.

If the VRCT is large enough, it is more likely to have some input into the registration process, as opposed to regulations being purely imposed.

As for signing up, I had no problem. I also view the annual fee in the same way as other membership fees - a necessary evil to ensure that details etc are correct.

Aren't they 'upping' the fee from £10 to £60?

Once again the little bit of paper wins. Registration does not mean you are any better at your job,only that some physicist has deemed you suitable. We used to have a good training scheme here where we took people from school and trained them to do the job with day release thrown in to get an HNC. Management in there infinite wisdom scrapped this and replaced it with a university degree course. Now we have 'technicians' with the correct piece of paper but absolutely no practical experience and therefore no idea how to do the job. The way forward is not registration for registrations sake.