We welcome the opportunity to respond to this consultation and fully endorse the principal that ‘professional regulation is central to the systems of assurance’ which safeguard people when they access healthcare services.
However, we believe that the consultation’s focus on the number and structure of individual regulatory bodies is to define the pertinent issues in too narrow a way.
The approach to regulation is the vital component to achieving the principle outlined above, and questions about the overall effectiveness of regulation at achieving the aim of improving practice and protecting patients are at the heart of this.
Statutory measures should be introduced within a culture that facilitates their objective of ‘promoting professionalism’; not put in place to castigate individuals for behaviours that may have developed as a result of system failures and poor culture that are ultimately the responsibility of organisational leaders.
Professor Don Berwick, in his 2013 review into patient safety in the NHS in England, stated: ‘In the end, culture will trump rules, standards and control strategies every single time, and achieving a vastly safer NHS will depend far more on major cultural change than on a new regulatory regime’.6
We believe that Professor Berwick’s statement gets to the central issue that needs to be addressed and echoes themes interrogated in the Francis Report following the Mid-Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust Public Inquiry in 2013.7
