How revalidation will work
The role of the medical Royal Colleges and Faculties 73. The medical Royal Colleges and Faculties have a key role in the revalidation process. Their principal responsibilities can be summarised as follows: a. Defining the relevant specialty and general practice standards. b. Validating specialty tools for the evaluation of doctors’ practice. c. Describing the types of supporting information that doctors will need to provide to meet the relevant specialty standards. d. Providing specialty guidance for appraisees, appraisers and Responsible Officers. 74. The proposals from the Colleges and Faculties on specialty standards, evaluation tools and supporting information can be found in Section 2 of this consultation document. 75. There remains the issue of College and Faculty involvement in the local appraisal process and the recommendation that the Responsible Officer makes to the GMC. 76. The Colleges and Faculties have discussed a number of potential models for their engagement in the local workplace-based processes that lead to a recommendation from the Responsible Officer on whether an individual doctor should be revalidated. All Colleges and Faculties feel that their role should focus on the setting of standards and agreeing the relevant supporting information for doctors in their specialty. This role would also involve providing guidance and advice to appraisers and Responsible Officers on the specialty standards and supporting information.
77. Additionally, some Colleges are proposing that they have direct input into the recommendations made by the Responsible Officer. This could be either by way of the quality assurance of the process and an auditing/sampling of some of the underlying information or having direct involvement in the recommendation for each of the doctors in their specialty by way of a local panel that would involve the Responsible Officer, College or Faculty representative and perhaps a non-medical patient representative. 78. It is clear that the statutory and legal responsibility for making the recommendation to the GMC lies with the Responsible Officer. Our preferred model is based on the Colleges’ involvement in a quality assurance and advisory role rather than having a direct role in the evaluation of every doctor or input into every recommendation to the GMC by the Responsible Officer. Responsible Officers should seek specialty advice in cases where there are concerns or questions about a doctor’s specialist practice from the relevant College or Faculty to help inform their recommendations. 79. This model does not preclude those Colleges/ Faculties whose specialists work predominantly outside managed healthcare environments (such as the Faculty of Occupational Medicine and the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Medicine) providing appraisal and Responsible Officer facilities where these would not otherwise be available. In such cases, the Faculties would clearly have direct input into individual recommendations to the GMC.
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