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To quote from the GMC Website:
Doctors must be registered with the General Medical Council (GMC) to practise medicine in the UK.
Patients trust doctors with their lives and well being. They need to have confidence that doctors are competent in their field and abide by high ethical standards.
The GMC's duty is to protect this public interest. By keeping up-to-date registers of qualified doctors, we aim to ensure that all registered doctors maintain the standards the public and the medical profession expect.
To quote from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
The GMC was established in 1858 by Act of Parliament.
The purpose of the GMC is to protect, promote and maintain the health and safety of the community by ensuring proper standards in the practice of medicine.
A practitioner not on the Medical Register of the GMC is forbidden to hold themselves out as a registered medical practitioner in the UK.
The Council is funded by annual fees required from those wishing to remain registered and fees for examinations.
The main guidance that the GMC provides for doctors is called Good Medical Practice. This outlines the standard of professional conduct that the public expects from its doctors and provides principles that underpin the GMC’s fitness to practise decisions. Originally written in 1995, a revised edition came into force in November 2006 following a two-year consultation process.
Since 2001, the GMC has itself become answerable to the CHRE (Council for the Regulation of Healthcare Professionals), which oversees GMC activity and may overturn previous verdicts.
Following recent legislation the GMC is implementing a comprehensive and wide-ranging reform of the organisation and its role. This is a result of considerable social change, but also highly publicised scandal cases such as the Shipman affair.
One of the recent changes is the shift of emphasis from simple registration to revalidation of doctors, more similar to the periodic process common in American states, in which the professional is expected to prove his or her professional development and skills. The revalidation process was expected to start in 2004, although it is being delayed by the publication and implementation of the Shipman Inquiry Report.
Due to its nature the GMC is positioned between the medical profession and the public, and has drawn criticism from both sides - from professionals for being overly harsh in fitness to practise decisions and from the public for being too mild. Calls have been made to abolish self-regulation by the profession, but a 2000 vote by doctors was 80% in favour of continued self-regulation, although many demanded reforms, one of which became revalidation.
Shipman Inquiry
The GMC was most heavily criticised by Dame Janet Smith as part of her inquiry into the issues arising from the case of Dr Harold Shipman. "Expediency," says Dame Janet, "replaced principle." Dame Janet maintained that the GMC failed to deal properly with Fitness to Practise (FTP) cases, particularly involving established and respected doctors.
In response to the Shipman report, Sir Liam Donaldson, the Chief Medical Officer, published a report titled Good doctors, safer patients, which appeared in 2006.
Donaldson echoes concerns about GMC FTP procedures and other functions of the Council. In his view, complaints are dealt with in a haphazard manner, the council causes distress to doctors over trivial complaints while tolerating poor practice in other cases. It accuses the Council of being "secretive, tolerant of sub-standard practice and dominated by the professional interest, rather than that of the patient". Former President of the General Medical Council, Sir Donald Irvine, called for the current Council to be disbanded and re-formed with new members.
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