Features: Working together: employers and doctors
Doctors and employers: working together towards revalidation
29 March 2010
Revalidation will be a shared responsibility
Apart from the GMC, the health departments, the Royal Colleges and Faculties, and individual doctors, revalidation will depend on healthcare organisations throughout the UK. They will have a key role in helping doctors to maintain and improve their practice and raise the quality of care.
Organisations that employ or contract with doctors will need to ensure that doctors who work for them are able to revalidate. They will also have a statutory duty to appoint a Responsible Officer who will support doctors in meeting the requirements of revalidation and then make recommendations to the GMC.
The proposals are based on strengthening existing systems for appraisal and clinical governance. Revalidation is about how doctors perform in practice, which is why it is vital that systems of clinical governance and appraisal are effective and can enable doctors to collect the information they need for their revalidation and for that data to be properly evaluated.
Healthcare organisations will be responsible for:
- A robust system of clinical governance (including appraisal).
- Arrangements to enable doctors’ continuing professional development.
- Systems that enable doctors to monitor their practice: through performance information, including clinical indicators relating to patient outcomes; through feedback from patients and colleagues; and in other ways.
- Annual appraisals that include an evaluation of the doctor’s performance against the professional standards set by the GMC and those of the relevant Medical Royal College or Faculty.
Appraisal standards
The GMC was required by the UK government to develop a means by which doctors’ practice could be appraised and objectively assessed based on Good Medical Practice.
We produced a framework in 2008, which set out how such a system might work and the standards that should be incorporated into all appraisal systems to enable doctors to reflect and identify areas of practice where they could make improvements.
We recognise that a single approach to appraisal will not be suitable for all doctors in all settings. The proposed arrangements reflect differences in practice settings and organisations. However, the key principles and generic standards, set out in Good Medical Practice, are broadly relevant to all doctors.
There are three types of generic standard:
- a. Those that will apply to the overwhelming majority of doctors, irrespective of the nature of their practice such as ‘keeping knowledge and skills up to date’.
- b. Those that apply only where doctors work with patients, act as managers or work in research.
- c. Those that depend on particular circumstances or events.
A number of pilots and projects have been running to test this approach and to seek to understand the resource implications of a strengthened appraisal system in supporting revalidation.
You can view the framework online at http://www.gmc-uk.org/doctors/licensing/revalidation.