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 2023 we'll continue our 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 do everything we can to help the UK’s health services respond to ongoing pressure.

We’ll also publish an updated version of our core guidance, Good medical practice in 2023. We’ve been developing this in collaboration with patients, medical professionals and healthcare organisations. We’re reviewing it to make sure it continues to be a shared and achievable picture of what good practice looks like for everyone involved in healthcare. 

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’re also working with education and training providers and employers  across the UK to tackle discrimination, disadvantage and unfairness in education and training. We’ve set a target to achieve this by 2031. In 2023, we’ll continue to partner with a range of organisations to create and test interventions that aim to address these issues, as well as sharing data and insights on fairness in medical training.

Revalidation and managing the medical register

Our medical register holds the details of the 356,304 doctors who are qualified to work in the UK. We’re 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.

Following the pandemic, our approach to revalidation provides maximum flexibility 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.

Where a concern is raised about a doctor, we’ll always consider the circumstances and any relevant context we’re aware of when deciding whether we need to take it forward. 

When we do need to investigate, we’re doing all we can to reduce the stress and impact for everyone involved. We’ve implemented a range of changes in recent years following our work with mental health expert Professor Louis Appleby, but we’re committed to keep learning and improving our processes.

We know that inequality and prejudice contribute to poorer care, which is why we’ve put tackling these issues at the heart of our 2021-25 corporate strategy. Together with others across the UK’s healthcare systems, we’ll continue to work towards our target to eliminate inequalities facing doctors in fitness to practise referrals from employers.

Managing the organisation

We have more than 1,500 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 research programme informs what we do and where we focus our efforts to have the greatest impact. We also share our unique data and insights regularly with the UK healthcare systems; our workforce report highlights trends from the register and makes recommendations to support workforce planning and help improve patient care.

We continue to work closely with the Department of Health and Social Care on their plans to reform the outdated legislation that underpins our statutory functions. This programme will enable us to deliver more flexible, agile and proportionate regulation for patients and all our registrants in the future.