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Section 1 – How revalidation will work
This section describes how the process will work and the basis on which decisions to revalidate will be made. 40. This section also covers how the process might work for those doctors in training roles or nonmainstream practice (paragraphs 80 –111). Revalidation, relicensing and recertification 41. All doctors who wish to keep their licence to practise must revalidate. 42. When the Government published its proposals for revalidation in 2007, it divided revalidation into two elements – relicensing and recertification. We are now proposing a single system. 43. The original idea was that all doctors who held a licence to practise would be required to relicense by demonstrating that they are practising in accordance with generic standards of practice set by the GMC. However, many of those licensed doctors are also on either the specialist register or general practitioner register (the ‘GP register’) held by the GMC. Under the original proposals these doctors, in addition to meeting the generic standards required for relicensing, would also have to demonstrate that they were meeting the particular standards relevant to their specialty or general practice. This process was referred to as recertification. If doctors did not recertify, they would risk losing their entry in the specialist or GP registers. 44. Since the Government published its proposals, considerable work has been undertaken to develop the standards and processes to support both elements of revalidation. This work has involved the GMC, the medical Royal Colleges
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and Faculties, specialist associations and others. As a result of this work, we have concluded that revalidation will be simpler, more effective and more efficient if it operates as a single set of processes rather than as the two separate strands of relicensing and recertification that were originally envisaged. There are several reasons for this. 45. First, revalidation is based on an evaluation of doctors’ actual performance in the workplace. This means surgeons are evaluated in their work as surgeons, and GPs are evaluated against the applicable standards for GPs. Although there are generic standards for all licensed doctors (as set out in our guidance to the profession Good Medical Practice), doctors across all levels of practice apply those standards in a way that is appropriate to the particular work that they do. When GPs communicate with patients, they do so in the context of their work as GPs and to the standards expected of GPs. There are not two separate standards for communication, one generic and one specific to their role as GPs. 46. Our work with the medical Royal Colleges and Faculties on revalidation has reinforced this conclusion. The specialist standards that they have developed are not separate from the GMC generic standards but build upon them and are specialty-specific iterations of the principles and values of Good Medical Practice. It therefore makes sense for there to be a single evaluation for revalidation, rather than separate evaluations for relicensing and recertification.