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The Professional Standards Authority for Health and Social Care (the “PSA”) has recently published a paper regarding proposals aimed at the transformation of the manner in which health and care professionals in the UK are regulated.
The paper, entitled Regulation Rethought, proposes a series of improvements to professional regulation and builds on the PSA’s earlier work in Rethinking Regulation.
In terms of specific reforms, the PSA’s proposals are bold and far reaching, seeking to transform central tenets of Fitness to Practise in the health and care professions. Amongst the proposals, the PSA recommends the following:
- Requiring all health and care professionals to work to a common set of standards.
- Moving towards a less “adversarial” approach to fitness to practise which does not necessitate formal hearing.
- Revising the language used in order to make regulation more accessible to the public. The PSA recommends that terms such as “fitness to practise” and “impairment” are avoided and replaced with plain English.
- Establishing a licensing system for health professionals undertaking work which is deemed to carry the greatest risk. The report suggests that this would mirror the driving licence system with different licences provided for different areas of practice.
The proposals contained in the paper serve as a welcome reminder to reflect on professional regulation and its core objectives.
The PSA is an umbrella regulator which oversees nine statutory bodies that regulate health professionals in the UK and social workers in England. You can read the PSA’s proposals in full here.
Authors: Lyn McCarthy and Maria Curran