EBME Forums Forums Management Professional Issues Statutory Regulation Professional Standards Agency

Interesting comment in the Health Service Journal from Harry Cayton (Chief Executive at the Professional Standards Authority) in response to Anne Burge's (Chair of The Alliance For Patient Safety) article on the response to the Francis Report and the value of statutory regulation.

http://www.hsj.co.uk/comment/voluntary-accreditation-the-choice-is-yours/5066938.article

The article speaks of "counsellors and psychotherapists, or sports rehabilitators or acupuncturists or healthcare assistants", but I quote the above line because I think it has particular relevance to our role. How many medical equipment companies and service providers will have service engineers on any kind of register?

I raised this concern in one of the APS threads, and to date no-one has been willing or able to answer my query. Unless it is intended that all service engineers from private companies working on patient-connected equipment will also be registered, what are we actually going to achieve?

If it is driven by safety, why is it that an NHS employee is unsafe unless registered, but an employee of [insert company name] is perfectly safe all the time?

The opening paragraph of the article sums up the whole registration debacle.

This highlights the type of scaremongering that these voluntary registers put out to justify their existence. They overstate the negaitve side of not being regulated, we are still waiting to see figures that back up their claims. They have the blind faith that regulation will stop ALL failures form ocurring. again where is the proof? By using the Mid Staffs failings as an example is way off the mark as most of the fault apparently, lay with registered professionals.

There is room for some kind of regulation for healthcare staff, probably under the guise of Professional Standards. But it must be appropriate to the actual work done and applied universally.

Looks like the statutory regulation route has been shelved strategically by the VRCT hierarchy, in favour of a more achievable aim, (without the shroud waving).

Government policy on the regulation of health professions is now that ‘assured voluntary registers’ will be put in place for professions not currently registered. No further professions will be registered without a compelling case on the basis of public safety risk, where an assured voluntary register was not enough to manage the risk

IPEM Professional Matters VRCT April 2014

Also, if the VRCT hierarchy have finally recognised the validity of concerns raised with regard to routes of entry,(if somewhat belatedly), this is a positive move.

RESMaG News

Another key issue raised by a number of people is the restricted entry routes. There are still those who were not in post for grand-parenting, and for whom the training schemes are not appropriate, but who should have a route to the register. As a matter of urgency, the VRCT Management Panel is looking into an equivalence route to allow entry on to the register. There will be more news of this in the New Year.