New Bill proposed on professional regulation
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- Published: Thursday, 10 April 2014 07:45
- Written by News Editor
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The General Dental Council (GDC) has welcomed the publication of the draft Law Commission review of Professional Regulation on 2 April 2014. In 2011 the Law Commission was tasked with creating a single streamlined legal structure covering all nine healthcare regulators, in order to provide better protection for patients by enabling regulators to act more quickly and efficiently.
Extracts from the Law Commission Report are published here. But the full summary report can be found at:
http://lawcommission.justice.gov.uk/docs/lc345_regulation_of_healthcare_professionals_summary.pdf
The draft Bill creates a single legal framework for all the regulators of health and social care professionals. The regulators’ existing governing legislation (such as the Dentists Act 1984) would be repealed, and replaced with a single Act of Parliament to provide the legal framework for all regulated professionals.
The draft Bill consolidates and simplifies the existing legal framework. It also imposes greater consistency across the regulators in some areas where this is necessary in the public interest. Otherwise the regulators would be given greater autonomy to be able to deliver their functions in a way that is suited to the profession concerned.
‘We recommend that the regulators should be given powers to make or amend rules concerning issues such as registration and renewals and education, standards and continuing professional development – which will no longer be subject to approval by Government or any Parliamentary procedure’.
‘We also recommend reforms to the role of Government in professionals regulation. Currently, the Government plays an active role in overseeing all aspects of the regulators’ functions, mainly through in its capacity as Privy Council adviser. This is not only at odds with the need to ensure the operational independence of the regulators, but Government no longer has the capacity to operate in the same way that it has to date’.
Our new system would impose duties on regulators to determine professional and education standards. We recommend giving the regulators powers to approve, and withdraw approval of, a range of matters relating to education, such as courses, institutions, placements and the environment in which education is delivered.
We think that there should be a requirement on the regulators to set standards for the profession or professions they regulate. However, the regulators should have flexibility over how to carry out this duty. The regulators will also be required to determine standards of continuing professional development.
The law provides that a person’s fitness to practise is to be regarded as impaired by reason only of one or more statutory grounds. We recommend that the existing statutory ground should be reformed. In the draft Bill, the grounds are:
(1) deficient professional performance
(2) disgraceful misconduct
(3) inclusion of the person on a barred list
(4) a determination by another regulator to the effect that fitness to practise
is impaired
(5) adverse physical or mental health
(6) insufficient proficiency in the knowledge and use of the English language
(7) convictions or cautions
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