Should there be fewer regulatory bodies?
This is one of the many questions posed in the Department of Health’s consultation document ‘Promoting professionalism, reforming regulation.’ There are currently around 1.5 million registered health professionals in the UK representing 32 professions (how many can you name?), registered with and regulated by nine regulatory bodies. These include the GDC (dentists who have the greatest fitness to practice expenditure), GCC (chiropractors), the GMC and of course our own GOC.
How they each protect the public, by regulating education (CET and CPD), improving public awareness and understanding, providing complaints and disciplinary procedures and ensuring fitness to practice among individual and group service providers, varies significantly.
Anyone who has complained about the level of CET requirement for our, as yet, low risk profession as compared with others who we are told ‘only have to buy a textbook to stay on the register’ already knows how professional regulation varies. And where one person sees a necessary buffer between a potentially authority abusing professional and a vulnerable and deferential public, others see unnecessary tiers of overpaid and under efficient Kafkaesque bureaucracy.
All four UK governments support greater efficiency of regulation, and no doubt include a significant cost saving in the list of advantages along with a standardised approach to regulation across all health professions. Others might argue that a single register across all professions would not allow true representation of the differences between each, where some might benefit from more stringent educational monitoring or stronger disciplinary powers.
I suspect views on regulation will differ among readers, certainly between the optical professions. Like so many consultation processes, too few of us are aware of them in time to contribute. Not so this time – there is a questionnaire on the gov.uk website containing 24 questions about the funding and powers of regulatory bodies and proposals to reduce their number and variation. Better to contribute now rather than when it’s too late.