Posts tagged with Revalidation

In a word: revalidation.

Amongst his medical friends, Dr No knows of two doctors who have already decided they will have no truck with revalidation. This is not because they are dodgy doctors, with dark secrets to hide – truth be told, they are very good doctors - but simply because the concept of the state deciding whether a competent, independent truly professional individual is indeed competent to practice is anathema, and a travesty of all that a true profession stands for. They would rather be out, than submit to state controlled ritual humiliation.

Press News: For Immediate Release

General Dalek Council finds ninety-six per cent of dalek organisations believe revalidation will help daleks be better daleks.

Dalek HQ, London: An independent study of over 3000 daleks in ten pathfinder sites to test revalidation has found strong support from organisations that took part. A large majority concluded that revalidation will improve the dalek experience.

'It is encouraging that dalek organisations recognise the potential benefits of revalidation,' said Niall Dickson, Chief Dalek at the General Dalek Council.

Pandora Needham, Postgraduate Medical Dean (North Region), has recently opened her box and set loose a fury of furies. A number of medical bloggers and other commentators, wide-mouths, forum sharks, hucksters, ne’er-do-wells and other assorted busybodies, including Dr No, have asked the obvious question: why open the box at all, and why now? Had the box remained shut, the unfortunate events of a few years ago would have remained locked in the box of history, gathering dust. By publishing the article which opened the box, Pandora on the face of it shot herself roundly in the foot.

It’s tough being a GMC Responsible Officer. All those doctors on your books, each one a lurking Shipman. Of course, the Herr Brother Officers at the GMC and the Department of Health appreciate the terrible stresses Responsible Officers face. The Herr Brother Officers wish to help the Responsible Officers in their duties, and so have commissioned the Herr Revalidation Support Team to devise eine support system to help support ze Herr Responsible Officers in the execution of zair duties. And so it is that ze Herr Revalidation Support Team is pleased and proud to present to all Herr RO colleagues ze one – and only – Responsible Officer Dashboard!

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.

The essence of trust is an implicit assumption of the benevolence of the other. Good marriages do not rely on annual appraisal folders, multi-source feedback or revalidation to stay on course; instead the partners simply trust each other. Indeed, the very concept of needing to re-establish trust periodically would be laughable. Why then do the medical revalidatchiks – the Obersturmführer Marshalls of this world – insist that we must replace implicit trust with explicit checking; and that revalidation is now a professional imperative, a ‘core professional activity and responsibility’ that we doctors ignore at out peril?

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.