The General Medical Council and the future of revalidation: Profession needs to debate regulator's role

doi:10.1136/bmj.330.7505.1447-a

BMJ 2005;330:1447 (18 June), doi:10.1136/bmj.330.7505.1447-a

Letter

The General Medical Council and the future of revalidation

Profession needs to debate regulator's role

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

EDITOR—Esmail insinuates that the public has lost confidencein the medical profession.¹ This is not true. The public putsdoctors at the top of the professional tree in poll after poll.The elites of medicine have lost their nerve, and that is theproblem. Esmail proposes that doctors are afraid of revalidation.We are not. What we, and our patients, do not want is to investtime and money in a harebrained scheme. We are loath to supportyet another cottage industry in medical governance.

Esmail asserts that revalidation is better than appraisal. Heprovides no evidence, only opinion. Appraisal, by definition,is a means of determining a doctor's effectiveness. This requiresthat activity data be gathered and then analysed. These dataare currently available, albeit incompletely, but are not analysed.They can be refined by using logbooks. That is all that is requiredto identify poor performance.

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Olusola O A Oni, consultant orthopaedic surgeon

Anstey LE7 7TH ooni141400@aol.com