The one-time partly elected General Medical Council, now reincarnated as a State appointed Stasi, has started to rev up its revalidation machine.
Appraisal will change from an annual tea and biscuits affair into a game of Russian roulette. Multi-source 360 degree feedback will provide a Catherine Wheel display of our gaffs. Serious Untoward Incident reviews will expose out deepest faults. No amount of lists of dutifully conducted CPD will erase the stain of our failures. The Herr Obersturmführer Appraiser will click his heels and pronounce our conduct inadequate; and the Herr Oberscharführer Responsible Officer too will click his heels, and regret to inform us that he is unable to make zee rekommendation that we be revalidated. Our career will end, not with a bang, but with a click.
In its proper form, the doctor-patient relationship is not unlike a marriage. It is founded, above all else, on trust.
One of the more striking and duplicitous bits of Nazi propaganda was their use of the slogan “Arbeit Macht Frei” – ‘work makes you free’. It was widely used, but never with more cynical and chilling effect than over the entrance gates to the death camps. Dr No cannot help but notice that the Obersturmführers of medical revalidation have already started a creep towards similar twisted propaganda.
Since the General Medical Council hopped into bed with the Department of Health earlier this year, we have seen surprisingly little in the way of overt matrimonial activity. It does appear, however, that there has much foreplay going on under the duvet, and the happy couple are moving ever nearer to that orgy of wanton destruction that will soon be on us – the orgy of enhanced professional regulation for doctors.
The German SS called it the Final Solution. The UK medical version of the SS, the General Medical Council, calls it Revalidation. Despite their very different contexts, the processes are remarkably similar.
Dr Maurice Colon, National Lead on Revalidating Doctors reports: ~ Well, I can tell you, we are all having a spiffing time down here at Revalidation Central.
Twenty five years ago, the General Medical Council’s Annual Retention Fee for doctors to remain on the Medical Register was £20, and the “Blue Book” – the Council’s code of professional conduct for doctors – ran to some thirty pages. Today, the same fee is £410, and the code, which is now issued in several volumes, runs to hundreds of pages.