Mad Hatters Tea Party

Apparently, the Lunatic Fringe Council formally known as the General Medical Council have developed GMC Affiliates. The documentation kindly sent to me by the slightly less disordered individuals there can be downloaded from here.

Put it this way, in short GMC Affiliates are spies for the General Medical Council. I know the Lunatic Fringe Council likes to couch the phrase in different and more acceptable terminology but thats them for you. I am sure they would make a murder look tame. I suppose the GMC Affiliate system would be interesting if it wasn't operated by those best suited to a Mad Hatters Tea Party. I hadn't of course understood the true extent of the dysfunctional behaviour until recently. Sure I had been told about it by a Ex GMC Committee member but what is truly fascinating is that the extent of this personality disordered behaviour is endemic and probably unsafe for many doctors. I shudder at the thought of such crazy people being responsible for handling large amounts of revalidation data.

Anyhow, I am positive the good folk in the NHS will discover very soon how bad things are - that is when revalidation hits the fan and licenses are stopped on a technicality. The fact remains, it is that technicality that expands quite broadly once the GMC catches it. One small issue expands into a spiders web. More often than not the GMC will side with senior medical doctors. A junior doctor only requires one dysfunctional one to ruin their chance of relicensing.

Relicensing is interesting and looks relatively harmless until you look at the potential for Medical Directors to essentially say one word to stop the license from proceeding. Take the example mooted this week by Witchdoctor and NHS Blog Doctor. A busy doctor who is excellent but did not have time to update her "folder". Her consultant was not impressed. Of course, paper doctors is a theory mooted by the GMC. That is how those who talk a lot [ as opposed to work a lot] dictate what good doctors should be. So, no one is assessing your ability to get the patient back from the dead. What is being assessed is how many lectures and CPD points you are able to earn. When I was a junior doctor, I didn't have enough time to breathe never mind sit and complete documentation. As everyone is aware, medicine is practical job - and while theory is important, it is what is done on the shop floor that counts.

Revalidation and appraisal is really about a central "collection of data". In my view, too much data in the hands of the lunatic fringe council is a very bad thing. The GMC misinterprets data on a regular basis and penalises the most vulnerable ie junior doctors.

So, here are the new regulations due in force soon. So any information collected by the GMC can [ if they wish] be disclosed to anyone really

Reference here.

(2) If the licensing authority considers it to be in the public interest to do so, the licensing authority may disclose any relevant information about the medical practitioner to—

(a) the Secretary of State, the Scottish Ministers, the Department of Health, Social Services and Public Safety in Northern Ireland or the Welsh Ministers; and

(b) any person of whom the licensing authority is aware—

(i) by whom the practitioner is employed to provide services in, or in relation to, any area of medicine, or

(ii) with whom the practitioner has an arrangement to provide such services.

2C

"require a medical practitioner or any other person (including another medical practitioner) to provide any evidence, information or document which C may reasonably request for or in connection with revalidation of a medical practitioner"

So, this "any other person" is rather interesting and of course if we are to believe the GMC, "anything can be in connection with revalidation". The other interesting issue admitted in the extract below is that the entitlement of relicensing is conditional upon the applicant's fitness to practise not being impaired. Now, if we are to believe the GMC, anything is now potential misconduct if the GMC wants it to be. To turn the argument upside down, we can see that if someone in their eyes is not " Fit to Practise" then instigating GMC procedures against innocent doctors is going to be fairly easy really.

For instance, if someone dislikes the material written by Dr Rant, NHS Blog Doctor or Jobbing Doctor, they can quite easily report it to the GMC, who will then place it against their revalidation and relicensing record and use that information to judge whether or not the doctors should be relicensed. It now makes it incredibly easy to stop anyone with critical ideas of the NHS - because anything in a doctors life can now stop them from practising. Essentially, the way data is collected at the GMC is this - anyone who enquires about a specific doctor has the enquiry logged under the doctors and their name. If there are any further concerns about the doctor, those enquiries may be reopened and followed up. Essentially, every comment, every allegation made against a doctor [ without the doctors knowledge] is listed against that doctors name on the GMC database. It seems logical that they would use this data for relicensing.

The Mothership has indeed Landed. This is so because no one has taken the time to stop it.

This is further confirmed by the forthcoming 2006 Statutory Instruments [Extracts Quoted Below]

"Entitlement to registration under any provision of the Act is now conditional upon the applicant’s fitness to practise not being impaired. The Registrar is given new, extended powers to obtaininformation about whether a medical practitioner’s fitness to practise is, or was, impaired at the time of registration – and he may remove medical practitioners from the GMC register (subject to rights of appeal) either if new information comes to light showing that their fitness to practise was 36 impaired at the time of registration but this was not disclosed at the time or if a practitioner refuses to co-operate with the new information gathering arrangements. Decisions to refuse to restore a person to the register for a fitness to practise reason, if they left it voluntarily or for non-payment of fees, are now appealable through the courts (Part 5

There are also changes to the fitness to practise procedures for medical practitioners post registration. The GMC are given powers to apply to a court to require production of documents from third parties relating to fitness to practise investigations, where these have not been supplied within fourteen days. It is also made clear that the GMC have the power to disclose information relating to a medical practitioner’s fitness to practise, whenever or wherever the matter to which it relates arose, where they see it as being in the public interest to do so, and to take decisions to disclose particular classes of information. A list is also provided of the decisions of panels and committees that have to be published, although the GMC is given powers to withhold, in the course of publication of these decisions, information concerning a person’s physical or mental health, where they consider the information to be confidential. Allowance is made for the possibility that a medical practitioner will concede, during an investigation into his fitness to practise, that his fitness to practise is impaired – and in these circumstances, the GMC may make rules in respect of the agreement of undertakings to be observed by the practitioner, and in respect of the procedure to be followed where such undertakings are breached. Fitness to practise hearings are to be in public, except to the extent that rules made by the GMC provide otherwise. There is also a change to the arrangements for the making of legal assessors rules (Part 6 and article 91).

"There are also changes to ensure that revalidation of a medical practitioner’s licence to practise can take place at any time, and to allow the GMC to make regulations about requiring medical practitioners to supply information to assist licensing authorities in determining when and how torevalidate them. There are also transitory arrangements enabling the GMC, a licensing authority or a future licensing authority to obtain information to assist them in preparing for the introduction of revalidation. Additionally, licence to practise appeals will have to be held in public, except to the extent that rules provide otherwise (Part 9 and article 90).

And there we are, we can of course thank Lord Walton at the House of Lords. and Baroness Finlay at the House of Lords who debated this Act and new statutes. Walton the ex GMC President is apparently still alive despite being a walking corpse with his brain as frazzled as it always was. Nevertheless, the powers bestowed upon the GMC or the next organisation which will be the GMC in drag staffed by the same people - is quite extensive. They have the power to do whatever they want when they want to whoever they dislike. This kind of power bestowed upon an organisation who is currently being judicially reviewed every week is quite dangerous. Power has already got to the heads of those who work there. Despite probably having one CSE to their name, those who work at the GMC tend to have delusions of grandeur. For instance a consultant recently told me that he had complained that the complaints against him were vexatious and the GMC worker smirked and stated that he " lacked insight". So essentially, largely intellectually inferior workers at the GMC are given superb powers to make prejudicial judgments on doctors. This is currently extremely dangerous.

And all this post Shipman has only happened because those who talk on the Common Purpose Doctors Only website run by old Cyril sit around gassing about pointless issues as opposed to preventing something that is a forthcoming danger. Anyway, as we all say - everyone deserves the system they fight for.

Anyway, as everyone will soon find out appealing a refusal to relicense a doctor is going to be superbly difficult. Indeed, if realism kicks in, a doctor could remain unemployed for months or years while the appeals proceed. This period of unemployment can ruin a junior doctor.

The MMC Fiasco was created by their predecessors who were essentially supine. The Revalidation/relicensing is due to be created because the current doctors are supine. Then perhaps supine doctors deserve what they fight for.

While I am sunning myself on a beach somewhere, I will probably hear the screams in about 1.5 years time.