Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures, tables and boxes
- List of contributors
- Foreword
- Introduction: mapping the territory
- 1 The ethical importance of boundaries to intimacy
- 2 The patient's perspective: impact and treatment
- 3 Teaching ethics and ethical behaviour to medical students
- 4 With the benefit of hindsight: lessons from history
- 5 The prevalence of boundary violations between mental health professionals and their clients
- 6 Psychiatry: responding to the Kerr/Haslam Inquiry
- 7 The general practitioner and abuse in primary care
- 8 Boundaries and boundary violations in psychotherapy
- 9 Sexual therapies: ethical guidelines, vulnerabilities and boundaries
- 10 Obstetrics and gynaecology: a special case?
- 11 Nurses as abusers: a career perspective
- 12 Medical management: governance and sexual boundary issues
- 13 Dealing with offending doctors: sanctions and remediation
- 14 Defending doctors: the protection society's experience
- 15 Regulation and its capacity to minimise abuse by professionals
- 16 The role of the General Medical Council
- Appendix 1 Extract from Vulnerable Patients, Safe Doctors
- Appendix 2 Codes of ethics of psychiatric associations in other countries
- Appendix 3 Guidance from the Council for Healthcare Regulatory Excellence
- Appendix 4 Examples of determinations by the General Medical Council's Fitness to Practise panels
- Appendix 5 Website resources and information
- Index
- Plate section
16 - The role of the General Medical Council
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 January 2018
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures, tables and boxes
- List of contributors
- Foreword
- Introduction: mapping the territory
- 1 The ethical importance of boundaries to intimacy
- 2 The patient's perspective: impact and treatment
- 3 Teaching ethics and ethical behaviour to medical students
- 4 With the benefit of hindsight: lessons from history
- 5 The prevalence of boundary violations between mental health professionals and their clients
- 6 Psychiatry: responding to the Kerr/Haslam Inquiry
- 7 The general practitioner and abuse in primary care
- 8 Boundaries and boundary violations in psychotherapy
- 9 Sexual therapies: ethical guidelines, vulnerabilities and boundaries
- 10 Obstetrics and gynaecology: a special case?
- 11 Nurses as abusers: a career perspective
- 12 Medical management: governance and sexual boundary issues
- 13 Dealing with offending doctors: sanctions and remediation
- 14 Defending doctors: the protection society's experience
- 15 Regulation and its capacity to minimise abuse by professionals
- 16 The role of the General Medical Council
- Appendix 1 Extract from Vulnerable Patients, Safe Doctors
- Appendix 2 Codes of ethics of psychiatric associations in other countries
- Appendix 3 Guidance from the Council for Healthcare Regulatory Excellence
- Appendix 4 Examples of determinations by the General Medical Council's Fitness to Practise panels
- Appendix 5 Website resources and information
- Index
- Plate section
Summary
Background
The General Medical Council (GMC) is the independent regulator for doctors in the UK. Its statutory purpose is to protect, promote and maintain the health and safety of the public by ensuring proper standards in the practice of medicine. In short, it ensures that patients can have confidence in doctors. The GMC does this by:
• keeping up-to-date registers of qualified doctors
• fostering good medical practice
• promoting high standards of medical education and training
• dealing firmly and fairly with doctors whose fitness to practise is in doubt.
Such a system should:
• put patient safety at its heart
• be independent of government and of dominance by any single group
• provide an integrated regulatory framework which keeps together the GMC's four interlocking functions detailed above.
Box 16.1 Kerr/Haslam Inquiry recommendations bearing on the GMC
Among the recommendations of the report of the Kerr/Haslam Inquiry were that managers, and mental health and social care professionals must be left in no doubt that the breach of professional boundaries with regard to their patients (service users) is unacceptable, and must always be treated as harmful. Every effort must be made to prevent all patient abuse. Ways to achieve this change of ethos include:
• Education – of all staff at all levels – on the identification and preservation of proper boundaries, and the harm caused by boundary transgressions, commencing at undergraduate level through all the relevant professions. The message must be reinforced in induction training, in continuous professional development and through employment contracts that detail specifically unacceptable behaviour. The message must be supported by clear and enforceable codes of conduct by National Health Service trusts and by the regulatory bodies. There must be clear boundaries, clear sanctions and no tolerance of the abuse of patients.
• Promoting the obligation to speak out. Patient safety requires a culture where speaking out (whether or not categorised as whistle-blowing) is welcomed, where minor transgressions can be addressed at early stages and (if possible) resolved. The National Health Service must fully support its staff, who in turn must be left in no doubt that the culture of turning a blind eye is unacceptable, and that to stay silent may be to perpetuate and thus participate in wrongdoing.
Source: Department of Health (2005).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Abuse of the Doctor-Patient Relationship , pp. 190 - 202Publisher: Royal College of PsychiatristsPrint publication year: 2010