would, therefore, fall within the HPC which, under its current remit, maintains statutory oversight over 14 healthcare disciplines and is empowered to impose specific standards of practice; approve courses and training resources; maintain registers of practitioners; and to enforce disciplinary proceedings on those breaching its standards.
This makes the HPC an effective and potent regulatory body – one that can make a very real difference to improving standards and achieving patient safety and care.
It also provides an effective solution that answers how clinical physiology could be brought under the umbrella of statutory regulation without adding excessive ongoing costs or additional red tape.
risks to patient safety) and, as important given the current financial climate, potentially significant costs.
This leaves us with several key questions that are true to all groups not statutorily regulated, but which are particularly relevant to clinical physiology. Do they want it? Do they need it? And how can it be achieved without involving lengthy and costly bureaucracy?
To deal with these in order, there is firstly considerable appetite for statutory regulation within the field of clinical physiology. The RCCP currently maintains a register of 5,000 practitioners, all of whom
Jul/Aug 10
have volunteered to enter into a regulatory framework that, as part of the RCCP’s guiding principles, includes a movement to statutory provision. This is a commitment highly valued by prospective employers in the health service and increasingly inclusion on the voluntary register is considered more as a requirement than simply desirable by employers within the NHS.
Statutory regulation is also warranted. By the very nature of their work, clinical physiologists provide services that directly affect the diagnosis and treatment of patients. Many of their procedures are invasive and have the potential to cause
harm if carried out incorrectly. This means that standards of best practice are paramount and require robust and extensive scrutiny that voluntary bodies cannot necessarily provide or enforce.
In 2003, the Health Professions Council, having considered evidence presented by the RCCP, recommended to the then secretary of state that the statutory regulation of clinical physiology needed to take place for the public’s safety. This recommendation was endorsed by the Department of Health which it now needs to urgently pursue.
Regulation of clinical physiology
A Section 60 order, as was recommended in 2003, issued by the Department of Health would achieve this without unnecessary and costly delays thereby providing this discipline of healthcare with a regulatory body able to act with speed, efficiency and absolute decisiveness.
The economic climate is already affecting how healthcare services are delivered and it is already clear that the NHS is going to be expected to make the best use of what of it already has. Consequently, it will be the maintenance of high professional standards by practitioners that keeps the NHS moving forward in the absence of additional public funding.
As has been shown, this will best be achieved through robust regulation that is most effectively enforced by a statutory body. So the impetus must be on statutory, to avoid being stationary.
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