We all know the National Health Service is in trouble thanks to the top-down reorganisation the Conservatives swore they would not force through before the general election in 2010.
In trying not to be the nasty party intent on letting the private sector run our NHS, the Tories have tried to position themselves as being the patient’s champion – pushing for improved quality of care and demanding greater transparency. This has included the ‘duty of candour’ to require health professionals to admit to mistakes that lead to patient harm.
But this, like so much of Conservative health policy, is paper-thin. Despite claiming to bring in better standards of care and safety, the Conservatives have a myopic and blinkered view when it comes to a measure that would ensure patient safety: regulation.
So intractably opposed are the Tories to regulation that they have allowed thousands of specialist professionals to remain without proper professional oversight. This includes the clinical physiologists who ensure pacemakers function correctly, and who perform a myriad of complex investigations and procedures on patients with the potential to cause serious harm. While the vast majority of these professionals operate to the highest of standards, there are inevitably some bad apples. But because the coalition has been negligent in taking forward the sorely needed regulation of these professionals, it remains nearly impossible to identify when things go wrong.
It is harder still to sanction incompetent or negligent practitioners.
The coalition government has instead attempted to apply a sticking plaster to this wound with the sop of voluntary registration, by which unregulated practitioners are encouraged to join professional registers. But these bodies, laudable as they might be, have no investigative capacity and lack the power to sanction or strike off practitioners who cause harm to patients. By failing to regulate these professionals, the government has left them outside its much vaunted ‘duty of candour.’
That is not to say that every unregulated professional working in the NHS needs to be regulated. But common sense if nothing else should dictate that those performing sensitive procedures and investigations must be subject to a greater level of professional scrutiny for their own good and that of their patients. The chief executive of the Health and Care Professions Council has recommended that clinical physiologists be statutorily regulated, and stated that, in their case, voluntary registration is ‘completely useless.’ These are warnings that the government should have, but have failed, to heed.
For the NHS to function properly, patient safety must be guaranteed. A succession of Tory health ministers have abdicated their responsibility by failing to regulate the likes of clinical physiologists. It is time to right that gap in patient safety.
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Rob Flello MP is member of parliament for Stoke-on-Trent South
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