UK Doctors to face regular competency tests and General Medical Council stripped of some powers. Also Nick Clegg, Andy Burnham, complacency...

Doctors to face regular competency tests

Extract:

"Doctors are to face checks every five years to check that they are competent to continue working, under new plans announced today.

The Government is also to strip the doctors' regulatory body of a key powers, in a move likely to anger medical professionals.

The General Medical Council will lose the right to adjudicate in fitness to practise cases when complaints are made against doctors.

The GMC will still investigate concerns about doctors but the final decision on what happens to a doctor is likely to pass to an independent tribunal.

The Government's White Paper is part of a response to the Shipman inquiry, which was heavily critical of the GMC. "

Well it's certainly high time for the GMC to be stripped of its adjudication of complaints about doctors since it has always so scandalously favoured doctors over complainants. But I question the procedures that will comprise the competency tests. - Consider the following:

The high prices of new drugs is claimed to be necessary to pay the huge costs involved in the research and testing that by law has to precede the launch of a new drug. - But this 'justification' rings very hollow to me, a steroid victim.

The British National Formulary is a reference book doctors are assumed to use to look up important information about the drugs they prescribe. - For well over 20 years certainly, and maybe even longer, sodium retention has been among the side-effects listed for the drug that made me a steroid victim. - Because of this side-effect of sodium retention, all patients who are prescribed this medication, or any other of the many medications that result in sodium retention, should be warned not to eat salt or food containing added salt/sodium while taking the medication. - I was not given this VITAL warning and I do not know of even ONE person who was given this warning! - In consequence there are scores of thousands of steroid victims in this country - made needlessly and gravely ill and disabled because they were not given a simple piece of information, which surely, is the very reason that for all the expensive testing... - What use, then, all the testing? all the vast expense? all the laboratory animals that suffered to provide information for the researchers? - ARE ANY OF THE MANY, MANY DOCTORS WHO PRESCRIBE STEROIDS (INCLUDING PREDNISOLONE AND HRT) ET AL IN THIS NEGLIGENT WAY COMPETENT TO PRACTISE? - NOT IN MY OPINION. - THEY ARE CERTAINLY NOT COMPETENT TO PRESCRIBE OR TO MONITOR THESE DRUGS. - The drug companies themselves must have long known of the need to avoid salt while taking these medications and must also have soon become aware, as the numbers of steroid victims grew, that doctors were not giving the warnings, but there was no warning on the packs of drugs with which I was issued...

When is this scandalous situation going to be remedied? - My MP, Nick Clegg, wrote to the Secretary of State for Health about it last year but received only complacency in the response from Andy Burnham, and no promise of any action. See Individuals and agencies who are responsible for the 'Obesity Epidemic' - I hope you will read the whole page.