BMJ  2005;330 (1 January), doi:10.1136/bmj.330.7481.0-g

Editor's choice

An important debate on the GMC

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

The General Medical Council—the regulatory authority for UK doctors—begins this year in crisis. Dame Janet Smith's inquiry into failures of regulation that allowed Harold Shipman to murder over 200 patients delivered bad tidings to the GMC in the last days of 2004 (see p 10). Richard Smith, close observer of the GMC during his career on this journal, argues that the GMC's failing is that it has put expediency before principle, and that further difficult reforms are essential (see p 1).

Readers may have been under the impression that the GMC was already in the business of reforming itself by increasing lay representation and allowing people who are not members of the GMC to adjudicate on fitness to practise. That impression was a reasonable one, but Dame Janet's report condemns those reforms—I paraphrase here—as ill conceived, inadequate, and unlikely to regulate the medical profession to the satisfaction of . . . [Full text of this article]

Kamran Abbasi, acting editor

(kabbasi@bmj.com)


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