Faculty Development

There have been recent developments in clarifying and confirming the role of the General Medical Council in revalidation, re-licensing and appraisal, partly in response to the government White Paper Trust, Assurance and Safety - The Regulation of Health Professionals in the 21st Century (Department of Health, 2007b). The White Paper set out a series of proposals for reform of medical regulation and gives a significant role to the GMC in setting standards for revalidation. Re-licensing will be ‘based on agreed generic standards of practice set by the GMC, a revised system of NHS appraisal for doctors and any concerns known to the doctor’s medical director (or responsible officer) and the GMC Affiliate’.

The GMC sees its role as providing ‘the core content of revalidation, and for other organisations to embed these in the context of appraisal systems or assessment for recertification’ (GMC, 2008). Revalidation is seen as a single set of processes, with two potential outcomes – re-licensing and, where applicable, recertification. To streamline processes, the GMC has started to translate Good Medical Practice into a standards framework and suggested sources of evidence against which individual doctors’ practice can be appraised and objectively assessed. ‘The evidence includes tools for feedback about doctors’ practice, which may take the form of questionnaires or multi-source feedback. The framework provides a foundation for the development of the appraisal and assessment systems that will from a key part of revalidation’ (GMC, 2008).