Baroness Young of Hornsey
“Not what the doctor ordered” – this was one idea for the title of the report which the Committee that I chair has just published. In the end, we decided on ‘Safety First’, not least because health professionals extend beyond doctors. The title encapsulates the issues that we uncovered in our inquiry, which took place over the last few months and is intended to contribute to a review of the relevant EU legislation.
When we go to the doctor, we expect to understand what the doctor has prescribed, and we expect the nurses, midwives and pharmacists to understand that too. We expect the doctor’s decision to have been made on the basis of sound and continuing training. And we expect the doctor to have a history of recommending the right treatment, without getting into trouble.
Above all, we place a lot of trust in those treating us and we expect our safety to be paramount. In recent years, however, our confidence and expectations have been damaged by a small number of high profile and sometimes tragic cases of malpractice involving health professionals.
My Committee therefore seized the opportunity of the European Commission’s review of the “Mutual Recognition of Professional Qualifications Directive” to examine these issues and see how the legislation can be improved in the future to boost patient confidence and place patient safety at its heart.
What did we conclude and recommend?
To improve understanding, we think it essential that regulators are able to test language competence at the point of registration. But language needs will differ according to the particular job – and so it is crucial that employers are also able to assess language skills, in addition to other non-verbal communication skills.
We were astonished to hear that the minimum training requirements for health professionals have not been updated for thirty years – these must reflect modern practice and must recognise that practices differ across the EU. Some doctors, for example, will routinely treat children, while others do not. We call for changes to the Directive to recognise changes and diversity.
A final part of the jigsaw is to ensure that health professionals that are deemed unfit to practise in one Member State are unable to work in another. This is not happening systematically. There are several reasons for this, but it is partly due to a lack of an easy system of sharing information. We therefore recommend the introduction of an alert mechanism so that authorities can share fitness to practise information and warn each other about practitioners who have been subject to disciplinary proceedings.
Our findings will be shared with the Government, European Commission and European Parliament, and I hope they will help to shape discussion over the next few months. Yes, mobility in the EU can bring significant benefits, but this must not be at the expense of patients’ health, care and confidence.
You can find our report on the Committee webpage at www.parliament.uk/hleug.
Here is another odyssey. How much thought does it need?
If 27 States unify and all of them speak different languages and train their professionals dissimilarly, leading to discrepancies across the board, how can they possible be considered suitable products to practice state to state? Especially when the requirement is, the health of the citizens of those 27 separate countries. That is complete idiocy to even contemplate.
Small example. I have a very close friend who happens to be a re-constructive surgeon, born and educated in Berlin. As a young intern he was required to work the most appalling shifts. And within those shifts, which meant overnight on the ward care of paralytic patients in a hands on manner, akin to the old nursing habits of this country. In Germany this was deemed necessary in order to not only master the art of being a doctor, but also to instill a knowledge of compassion that has never left him. If this technique is to be gained only one state, how can it be expected in any others that do not have such standards imposed?
You really have to search to appreciate the logic in these directions by those who lay down our laws. Surely it is time to get rid of these non thinkers and replace them with people who not only have an intellect but a genuine knowledge of the profession they fake an understanding of.
Surely the answer has to be a central European set up where these ‘migrant workers’ can be tested to see if they meet the requirements of the country they plan to work in. As well as a full and fluent knowledge of and use of the language they intend to practice in.
Alternatively, one language from the start and one set of training for all participants. Unification in its true spirit, not fooling around on the outside, which leads to a dangerous scenario for us all.
And an up to date verifiable certificate, that is corruption proof, then made available to those who have earned it. Along with a strict requirement of proof of identity before they commence.
This will lessen the occurrence of the Ubani type abuse of power, which is what he did and got away with.
Additionally all medical employees entering Europe or the UK should be proven to be of the highest ability and education, as well as be absolutely fluent in language requirement. Which is not presently expected here at all. Pigeon English is what greets you in most of our medical facilities now. Which is unprofessional and alarming to those who need their assistance.
This guy didn’t receive his training inside Europe, he got it elsewhere? Who gave him a certificate? Was it a fake he paid for? Who knows?
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ukpress/article/ALeqM5gGAA3o5GFf8JXGHzkvIRBUqAlcfQ?docId=N0150001318979598421A
unify and all of them speak different languages and train their professionals dissimilarly,
Language skill is no longer a problem, with English as the first language, even in medical matters.Many medical terms are comprehensible through knowing some Latin and greek.
Baroness Young,
In the world quite reomote from yours in which I am fairly well known I am known for splitting the difference as a sort of theme in my life. Here is a case in point:
A final part of the jigsaw is to ensure that health professionals that are deemed unfit to practise in one Member State are unable to work in another. This is not happening systematically. There are several reasons for this, but it is partly due to a lack of an easy system of sharing information. We therefore recommend the introduction of an alert mechanism so that authorities can share fitness to practise information and warn each other about practitioners who have been subject to disciplinary proceedings.
Is it not possible that equality is often a bad thing and that while serious failings should disqualify doctors and others everywhere there may be places where docotrs and others are in short supply and some would be better than none — places where agrey area would be best. If a doctor does not quite meet the standards in the top places he or she could move to such an rea forever or for a rehablitating period and do some good work. This involves acknowledging that some poeople will get less than others — the ultimate sin in our age. But if my child were to die from no doctor at all or live from the doctor provided by a program suggested by a bigoted theorist like myself I might prefer that he live using a second class doctor…
@FWS3:
How is it you Americans are always so interested in giving the UK your off beam advice rather than tell the ‘White House’ what it should be doing?
Is this a US trait that comes from the top down, interference in countries not their own, whilst their own is in total chaos, especially on the matter of health.
Join the ‘White House blog’ and let your ‘President’ know what you want in the USA. You voted him in after all, so you owe it to him to keep him in touch. That would make far better use of your ideas than trying to sell your sickening nonsense to us.
Maude Elwes,
1.Sadly we all live in the same world and the UK makes great efforts to be influential and thus if it has a public blog it can expect some American commenters.
2. I also am involved with people all over the world in ways which would take pages to enumerate and therefore if I did not comment here I would still have some influence which the UK might like to pretend does not exist but still does exist.
3.Thirdly I have family ties in the broadest sense in four EU countries. My family and friends travel there (and all over the world) often and I have lived in the UK myself while my father studied at King’s College at the University of London.
4. The Queen’s Apology to the Acadians is housed a few miles from where I am typing this comment.
5. I do in fact attend meetings and town halls with my Senators and Congress people as well as my State Governor. I voted a few days ago on numerous races and four Louisiana Constitutional ammendments. I founded (an later closed)an anti-Obama group online at one time and have never hesitated to declare my opinions on national politics.
6. My online Connections and Facebook friends include people in many layers of our complex government and I have met and corresponded with Presidents. But if one classes ins and outs as types of political creatures then I am an extreme out.
7. Baroness Young is a very “tough cookie” to use to use a term from the Yahoo wastelands to your west and can quite manage a conversation with me if she chooses to have one…
ensure that health professionals that are deemed unfit to practise in one Member State are unable to work in another. This is not happening systematically (Paragraph 7)
This may at least ensure that rogue surgeons, who do a runner, will not be able to practice in other countries in the EU which can only be good.
That does not rule out their departure for the rest of the English speaking world, which is already quite a lot.
There may not be that many other Euro State nationals who would want to, or do, practise in UK, on account of language and culture, so their rogues might also prefer the USA, for example.
Stats would be useful, before bothering with niceties. I’ll have a look.
Can we possibly know where rogue surgeons go?!
In a world of global villages, they might go to any one of them.
1 in 10 of practising UK Gps is from another EU country. I find that very difficult indeed to believe indeed except for the influx of
East Europeans over the last 15 years, both doctors and patients. Dental surgeons…yes
plenty of Poles, Greeks and others, but hospital surgeons. Aren’t they mainly from
the Indian sub continent (all of it)?
http://www.publicserviceeurope.com/article/245/regulating-healthcare-professionals
With any luck we won’t need to bang our heads against a brick wall to get a dangerously stupid EU Directive changed.
If the vote in the Commons on Monday goes the right way, then at long last the public may get a say on our membership of this wretched organisation.
I won’t hold my breath though.
@Chris K:
The UK wants its doctors to be ‘international.’ Which of course ends up with few UK born doctors being first choice.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10202803
Of every position in the UK needing a medic, there are approximately two hundred applications. The advice from government to the unit seeking an applicant is, to employ from overseas first.
http://www.historyandpolicy.org/papers/policy-paper-118.html
There are numerous British doctors unable to find employment as a result of this policy. But it is kept quiet.
Now I wonder why that is? And I wonder why the BMA goes along with it? And has done for years.
Maude, I want the very best people treating us. Goodness knows for the huge amount in tax you (and eventually I will) pay, we deserve it.
I don’t care where these people come from, I think it is totally wrong that Lithuanian doctors can jump off the ferry and we can’t even test their English ability, whereas Australian/Indian/New Zealand doctors are put off from coming here at all because of the hoops we make them jump through (simply because, unlike for EU doctors, we are allowed to)
@Chris K:
If Indian, Australian and New Zealand doctors are put off coming here, and you belive that, then I feel you must be wearing blinkers.
The entire hospitals surrounding me have nothing else but. In fact, I go with a relative to one of the Cardiology units on a regular basis, at her local ‘flagship’ hospital. And the entire, and I mean ‘entire’ team is Indian. Both male and female.
Additionally, all the nursing staff, receptionists and helpers are either from Nigeria, Somalia or Indonesia.
And I don’t live in Tower Hamlets.
@Chris K:
Narrow thinking will not make us a powerful and wealthy nation.
More integration is what is needed with us at the helm. What should be happening, is not that we pull out, but that we insist on British natural ability of basic common sense and a superior form of integrity in those who make the rules. And we are not doing that. We sit like frightened kids told to keep their mouths shut. Or, with your sense of flight rather than fight.
Look around you. If you shun what is rightfully ours, what will take its place? Be afraid of that.
Maude: I look around and I see lots of wealthy and free nations who punch well above their weight on the World stage.
They can attract the best people to work there and businesses and individuals are not weighed down by idiotic rules and regulations. They can deport people who abuse their hospitality.
Giving away our sovereignty and self-determination is guaranteed to make us neither wealthy nor powerful.
But if that’s what the British public want to happen then, in a democracy, I have to accept that.
All I want is to be asked.
Our doctors are undermined all of the time by Atos healthcare, what are the government planning to do about that?
When will they ever learn –
that Illness-Treatment
(e.g. by Doctors and other “health”- professionals and the NHS)
is almost diametrically opposite to and in conflict with Health-Care, the maintenance of the individual’s existing healthy-habits and the support of and for longterm-wellbeing-building intentions ?
Language-comepetency: that’s become a dangerously sick “joke”:
even ethnicpersecution is cowardly-called “ethnic cleansing” – (oops! tyhere goes anglophonism down the global-flush pipe) –
Please read the life-experience reports and publications references given in my previous submissions to a wide range of LOTB blogs;
and there are still further advances in health, wellbeing, and individual-human-development know-how and knowledge being published but ignored, denied, xenophobicly-crushed underfoot by Establishments, Governments, the Dominant-professions including both the Media and the Education & Training Sector.
(Don’t blame The People; they are all ‘brain-washed’ and compromised, by deliberate political and social disinformation, misinformation, workplace-blindfolding, lifeplace-blinkering, and even by such so-called up-to-date, impartial, objective, and democratically free sites as Wikipedia and Wikileak).
If you want to see what is in my opinion causing more harm to the respect of the medical profession, than anything else for countless people – look no further than ATOS and the assessments they carry out.
I hate to think how many people will be losing faith in the medical profession because of the mess they leave behind.
Plenty of evidence, if you have not seen it feel free to ask for details.
From Baroness Young:
@Frank – The alert mechanism that we suggested relates precisely to those professionals which, as you described, have demonstrated serious failings. Yes, there will be places where medical professionals are in short supply and it is exactly for that reason that mobility must be welcomed as a principle – but without compromising safety.
@Maude – You are right to imply that none of this is truly rocket science! What is important is that professionals around the EU share information with each other (professionals talking to professionals) about the nature of training and practice around the 27 Member States. In that way, I hope that curricula can become more aligned, while allowing Member States to fit curricula to their national circumstances.
@Twm O’r Nant – I can confirm from the evidence that we received from the medical regulator, the General Medical Council, that 9.7% of doctors on the UK Medical Register qualified in other parts of the European Economic Area, and that 37% of those on the Medical Register qualified outside the UK. You mentioned that rogue surgeons might go to the rest of the English speaking world rather than to other EU countries, which is a fair comment. I should perhaps add that UK regulators do already share information about fitness to practise both with other EU countries and with countries outside the EU.
None of the peers, parliamentarians, and other peak- professionals, especially the Illnesses-Sector workers (‘NHS’)
– but having to include alas! the Alternative Remediation and Health-Education practitioners sub-sub-sector –
is fit for Purpose,
nor even for short-term (small-p) purpose(s);
and that is because the world’s underlurking obsolescent-constitutions, and over-shadowing faulty economics, both fall fatally short of comprehending, publishing, and sustainworthily-practising a sustainworthily-workable “Order of Earthlife Purposes & Means ‘versus’ Humanlife’s Purposes and Means”.
(Apologies, but there are no fit-for-purpose “politically-correct” nor even “socially correct” words available to me).
Perhaps the Hansard moderator Beccy Allen has not verbatimly published what Baroness Young intended e.g. for
FWSIII
( whose posts were not rigidly confined to what BA –BY report him as saying “those professionals who have demonstrated serious failings”;
and whose concept of the new-sore “we all live in the same world” should have been seen to sub-include the condition that some people do actually live in different worlds (his opening words “In the world quite remote from yours…” ;
and whose major constructive contribution (and I JSDM apologise I am doing an encompassing summary here)
is that (“) all professionals (not only Doctors) need to be graded as to level of ‘fitness-for-purpose’ and be licensed only for the fields and
levels they are 100% competent in(“)
?
Miles JSDM,
Words have multiple meanings. Sometimes these are easy to detect: light weight, luminous light, and light reading are examples of this. “Worlds” also means multiple things we all live on one planet, Gaiea, or terra. We all live in one of a number of possible cosmos structures as well as our idioverse of perception. Thus I stand by both my statements. Dumbing down of vocabulary was noted by George Orwell and by his good friend Eric Arthur Blair who agreed on many things. I am quite sure it is true that when I weigh in on these matters which are weighty matters the way I choose to separate cream and whey of an argument is not fey just because I choose two terms for an aspect of the Milky Way and one for two aspects of its most discussed location. This way is (to use slang) way easy to grasp if taken its own way.
But I do think you see my fitness of purpose argument well. The most recent comment I have on Baroness Murphy’s post “Scientific…” sums up where I am drawing the energy for the remarks.
The reply to Twm O’r Nant, through Beccy Allen, above, has confirmed that 46.7% of UK doctors, in current employment here, are from outside the UK. Or, they gained their qualifications from outside this country, but are practicing here, whilst those trained in our own institutions are sidelined.
Now here is an open acknowledgment that the majority of the people of this country are not being fairly represented because of political correct madness. The fact is, we are employing an over abundance of people, in a profession of power over life and death, who are not educated here, are trained abroad and then they wonder why many of our citizens feel they have no connection to or gain any empathy from those in such an intimate arrangement in their lives. Are they therefore telling us, that 47% of British people are from abroad? Hence the desire to hire according to the make up of the population?
And Damian Green yesterday told us we must continue with this ‘American imported’ policy of ‘positive discrimination’ regardless of whether we, the people, want it or not, because to repeal such insanity would return us to comedians, once again, as they did thirty years ago, telling racist jokes!
Frankly, this is beyond comprehension. In essence, our own medically and impeccably trained people, with the proper requirement in language, are turned down in favour of those from abroad to an unbelievable proportion of the population.
And, if we speak of this disproportion, Mr Green tells us, it is simply because we have nothing else to center on as those who raise it, are white, non working, middle class, English men, centering on Empire and the loss of. And PC is all they have to worry about. The insult of this creep is beyond words.
I think his position should be put up for scrutiny as he is a middle class white man in a job that is over subscribed by such individuals and that has to be addressed at once. Because ‘our Parliament’ and ‘our government’ must be at least 47% foreign born or educated to keep up with the quota they have for the rest of the jobs covered by state office.
In fact, our Prime Minister is not only white, English and educated here at an elitist Public School, therefore, not at all representative of the policy, Damian Green, tells us is right for our country in his statement. In fact, no Prime Minister, other than Disraeli, springs to mind as meeting this criteria he claims is right for us, and so under his auspices, both he and Clegg (a white man of Russian decent)should be removed immediately and replaced by those born and educated outside the UK. Mr Miliband would therefore be a better contender as he is of immigrant stock first hand. However, not quite up to standard for regulation requirements is he?
Needless to say, this policy only applies to those white English men in the street. Mr average. Whilst Parliament, once again, is exempt.
How surprising that I didn’t get a reply.
But then I am just a foaming-at-the-mouth, xenophobic ‘right-wing’ europhobe. So my opinion can be quite justifiably ignored by our law-makers. I’d better get used to it…or emigrate.
Baroness Young,
Not surprised but pleased to see you draw the distinction. Thank you for setting that out.
Beccy Allen,
I did not mean to leave you out –thanks.
Who regulates ATOS?
The individual assessors are regulated by the likes of the GMC/NMWC, but who regulates their overall operation, via atos?
There is a system wide breach of GMC procedure due to ATOS, and I beleive a massive problem also with the DWP doing similar in its instructions to the medical profession.
Who regulates things like that in the medical world?
Whats the point of complaining about one assessor or doctor when the problem is system wide?
How can you reconcile, software being used to generate medical reports by atos, software that is not available for public inspection (even you baroness will be denied a working copy of it), or even peer review?