Revalidation

Sir Liam Donaldson has announced, with considerable fanfare, his proposals for revalidation of doctors.

This is how one consultant (a radiologist) has responded:

I am a hospital consultant who, in common with other consultants, has been undergoing annual 'assessment' in the form of appraisal since 1993. The overwhelming majority of doctors will have nothing to fear from this but let us not delude ourselves that this, or any other, system of assessment would have stopped Shipman. Shipman was a murderer who simply happened to be a doctor.

On a different note, the medical profession will not take kindly to Donaldson lecturing them on accountability. He is the senior doctor in the country and so far has demonstrated no accountability for his key role in the fiasco that saw hundreds of young doctors lose out on getting jobs last year. Nor has he demonstrated any accountability to those senior members of the medical profession who passed not one, but two, votes of no confidence in him as CMO last year. It appears that accountability only applies to those doctors who have not decided to become career politicians