How we use your fee

Supporting doctors with their practice

We support doctors to deliver the highest standard of care to patients. We do this by providing guidance and advice on professional standards and medical ethics. We also work with doctors and organisations at a local level to support quality improvement and patient safety through our Outreach teams.

In 2021 we'll continue to work with partners across the UK health services to improve working environments and cultures, making them supportive, inclusive and fair for medical professionals. And we’ll continue do everything we can to help the UK’s health services respond to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and deliver patient care. Find out more about our work to support doctors and patients during this difficult time.

We recently published updated Decision making and consent guidance, and in the coming years we’ll review more of our ethical guidance to make sure it reflects the diverse needs of patients.

Overseeing the quality of doctors’ education and training

We set the standards for undergraduate and postgraduate medical education and training. We also check the quality of training using tools such as our annual national training survey, which allows us to measure how our standards are being delivered, and whether educational experiences are being provided in safe, effective and supportive training environments.

When there are concerns about training, we take action. This can include placing organisations in enhanced monitoring. Through this process, we work with organisations to improve the quality of training for the benefit of doctors and patients.

We’ll also continue our work with education and training providers and employers in all four countries of the UK, to make sure progression through training is fair and flexible.

Revalidation and managing the medical register

Our medical register holds the details of the 335,672 doctors who are qualified to work in the UK. We keep this up to date by checking the identity and qualifications of every doctor who applies to join the register. We’re also doing all we can to ensure our registration routes are as flexible and accessible as possible, as part of our efforts to help support the future sustainability of the medical workforce.

We continue to work with responsible officers and suitable persons to make sure that doctors are giving good care to patients, that their knowledge and skills are up to date, and that they’re fit to practise through revalidation.

During the pandemic, we moved the revalidation submission dates of more than 50,000 doctors to help healthcare providers and the profession to prioritise frontline services. We also made changes to our systems so that doctors can revalidate when they’re ready to, rather than needing to wait until their due date.

We’ll also work with our partners to explore how we can further develop and improve appraisal and revalidation, to make sure they’re supportive and positive experiences for all doctors.

Managing complaints about doctors

We assess concerns about doctors and act if we believe patient safety or the public’s confidence in the profession is at risk. In recent years, we’ve reduced the proportion of the money we spend on investigations by taking steps to streamline our processes. This means we've been able to invest in other areas that aim to support doctors and improve workplace cultures.

Since the start of the pandemic, we’ve worked to minimise the impact of our investigations. We continue to be flexible on investigation timescales, as we recognise that different parts of the healthcare system are experiencing the impact of the pandemic in different ways. And where a concern is raised about a doctor, we’ll always consider this on the specific facts of the case, taking into account the factors relevant to the environment a doctor is working in.

Together with others across the UK’s healthcare systems, we’ll continue to tackle unfair referrals to regulators, as well as bullying and discriminatory behaviours.

Managing the organisation

We have more than 1,400 staff who work across England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. We work with doctors, employers, educators and patient organisations to help make sure doctors can deliver a high standard of care to patients.

Our data and research informs what we do and where we focus our efforts. We also share our insights with healthcare organisations to help improve patient care and to support workforce planning.