From Healthcare Republic
The GMC has seen a huge rise this year in the number of doctors being reported to it with concerns over their fitness to practise.
The monthly rise in cases this year is up 30 per cent on 2008.
The rise may signal that trusts are clamping down on bad doctors in advance of revalidation.
'The referrals are coming mainly from the NHS and they are not trivial,' said GMC chairman Professor Peter Rubin.
'It is likely to be a precursor to the introduction of revalidation. Employers are beginning to take stock,' he said.
The increase is so great that doctors up before the GMC are waiting longer for investigations and hearings.
GPC negotiator Dr Beth McCarron-Nash said she did not believe the number of doctors needing to be referred to the GMC had actually risen, and urged PCTs to work towards resolving concerns locally where possible.
She added: 'Referral to the GMC is not the way for PCTs to deal with doctors whom they feel are not performing to their best.
'They should look to empower practices and GPs having difficulties to get better, and work with LMCs.'
And that is why the NHS complaints system is so piss poor, bad doctors are being protected.
Angus
Angus Dei on all and sundry
AnglishLit
Angus Dei politico
1 comment:
GP's "having difficulties"; my heart bleeds, I stifle a tear (can a tear be stifled?). Anyway I don't really give a flying f**k about the poor downtrodden Medics with their safe jobs and pensions. It's about the patients; we're the one's generally being Royally stuffed, sidelined, ignored, patronised, injured, traumatised, damaged, and of course, killed and maimed. Often, by someone we never meet, talk to, or can even hang a name on!
The complaints system is a complete travesty. It makes the concept of justice in a civilised society into a complete joke. It takes perfectly normal, good people, to whom something bad has occurred and turns them into paranoid, guilty, gibbering wrecks who begin to disbelieve thier own sanity, veracity and of those whom they love. It brought me to the very edge of my sanity and nearly destroyed my relationship with the one I love, more than life.
Such is the power of the complete w*****s that invariably respond to complaints or you have the misfortune to have to confront, that mostly do little else. Sure, they have notional clinical titles but when you examine thier CV's you find they are 'Single Joint Experts' or Expert Witnesses, accredited this and verified that, with a case record that would really make it impossible for any real patient care or treatment to be practised. Any that is, except that would likely be in the 'private practise' that thier privileged position in the NHS allows them, with little or no cost to them, of course.
The NHS has simply become a 'gravy train' for the Management, The Consultants, Big Pharma and the Service Co's, ISTCS etc, etc.It pays no attention to the needs of its constituent; The Patient (the real paymaster) and grovels to the objectives of the Politicians; objectives that have mainly been sown in these fertile minds by them in the first place.
The Complaints System together with all its papers tigers, PALS, Carers Federation, Patients Association, AVMA, either won't, can't or simply don't know how to attack this problem. It (the system) needs accountability built into it. Yet 'local resolution' is simply the Medics examining themselves. If you get to the last stage you now have the Ombudsman. As they've only just been given the responsibilty who knows what it will be like? But, it bodes not well, anything with the word 'Parliamentary' in its title is seriously f****d before it starts.
No attempt has ever been made to make the NHS accountable, except the 'lip service' perpetrated in the form of the NHS Complaints System. There are too many vested interests to allow it to have teeth, even some of the 'good' people in the support bodies delude themselves that they are effective. They are not.
Perhaps the trick is to get them all ( the Medics) to get it right the first time, and to have an open and transparent system of investigation when it (rarely) goes wrong. Oh b******s that's what we're told we have now!
Maybe the Chinese have the right idea. Firing and Squad has a certain ring!
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