Revalidation - GMC must make it objective as soon as possible

The shortest overview of revalidation

GMC is commencing the process of revalidation for doctors in December 2012. The revalidation demands that we have evidence of 

1) Continuing professional development

2) Quality Improvement Activity

3) Significant events

4) Feedback from colleagues

5) Feedback from patients

6) Review of complaints and compliments

These six will populate the annual appraisal which apart from its main domains include the personal development plan, probity and health

Based on the above, the responsible officer will make a 'judgement' on whether the doctor can be recommended for revalidation. The GMC will then make a decision on whether the doctor has been successfully revalidated.

There is plenty of guidance on GMC website : http://www.gmc-uk.org/doctors/revalidation.asp

Concerns about the background for revalidation

While the issue of periodic quality assurance of licensed doctors has been discussed for a long time, the common view is that the current revalidation efforts commenced after the Bristol enquiry and gathered momentum after the Shipman enquiry. Bristol was an outlier, there was no trend that many hospitals or many cardiac surgery units were having unacceptably bad outcomes. Shipman was an outlier, there was no trend that many doctors were behaving or beginning to behave in a Shipman like manner. Outliers need to be analysed properly so that outliers can be stabilised to a performance level compatible with other performers within the general system. Quality principles would suggest that outliers should not trigger a process change for the whole system. Process change for a system could be triggered by an unacceptable trend (there are other reasons to change the process as well, but outlier is generally not one of them). To create a process change on the basis of outliers is thought to result in unnecessary expense and wasted effort.

This does not mean that we cannot learn from outliers, undoubtedly there are extraordinarily important lessons to be learned from Bristol and Shipman.

Linking the background to current revalidation method

Bristol is about performance and Shipman is about behaviour. We can safely assume that this is what the GMC seeks to assure. Quality assurance needs to be demonstrated in an objectively measureable manner.

Revalidation criteria - Not Objective

The six areas of evidence that the GMC asks for seem to be mostly subjective.

Continuous professional development (CPD) is generally accepted as a reflection of time spent on courses and conferences or other learning opportunities. It is certainly not a measure of the knowledge or skills gained or updated though that might happen. Some professional bodies have not defined the time needed to be spent on CPD. Hence while CPD is often measured and entered as a number it is a measure of time spent rather than a number to show the knowledge or skills gained. It could therefore be argued that CPD is either subjective or fit for purpose for revalidation if the intention was to validate or assure knowledge and/or skills.

Quality Improvement Activity: within this areas a range of activity is included. Activity is neither outcome nor achievement. Therefore activity is again time spent rather than gains (or losses) measured. An important point in quality improvement activity is that people fail more often than they succeed, that is the nature of quality improvement. Doctors, hospitals and the GMC should be comfortable with that. This could be potentially be an objective criteria but currently it could probably be considered unsure.

Learning from significant events and review of complaints and compliments are about self-reflection and reflective writing. It is obviously subjective. Feedback from colleagues and feedback from patients though done through validated tools by external or independent service providers is essentially the conversion of subjectivity into a scale to be able to measure.

Are subjective criteria relevant?

Absolutely yes. But only when looked along with objective criteria. Any form of quality assurance process must include subjectivity. The current criteria for revalidation seems mostly subjective and hence the concerns.

Why are objective criteria important?

We are talking about doctors who are essentially already very highly qualified and doing an extremely complex job under phenomenally varying conditions. We are taking about professionals on whom we have already spent somewhere between half-a-million to a million pounds before they are employed to do their role. Revalidation is about making a decision about their careers which could potentially be halted. To make such major decisions on mostly subjective criteria would not make sense. Further, there are planet loads of data already gathered and analysed and hence objective criteria are possibly already available if we wanted to use them.

Next is the issue of who may potentially be adversely affected to a higher degree than most. When subjective criteria are used there is a risk that often the weak, the easy targets and usual suspects may be affected. This has been seen in a few exam situations where certain sections of candidates pass the objective knowledge and skill components but fail the subjective elements of vivas, communication, simulation etc. There is a fear that it is possible that IMGs and BMEs (and SAS) doctors  would be affected by the level of subjectivity involved in revalidation.

There are good reasons behind these fears which relate to the culture and history of healthcare institutions and the culture and mind-set of BME/IMG doctors which is not explored here.

Increasing objectivity

Testing knowledge has traditionally been done by examinations. Americans revalidate their doctors on the basis of an objective examination of knowledge. This while reducing bias increases the validity of assurance of knowledge. Skills assessment could quite relevantly be based on performance data. Speaking from a hospital doctor perspective, this should be quite easy to do with some minimal tweaking on how data is gathered. Operational performance data is either the best or as good as any other indicator of a doctors skill.

Increasing objectivity still would not resolve the underlying issue of a process change for all doctors based on outliers and not trends. The GMC also needs to resolve other issues. Is revalidation a quality assurance process or a quality improvement process? Because the theory and the tools for assurance are different from improvement

Revalidation is important. It is likely that as it stands the revalidation process is heavily subjective. Given the importance of healthcare of the nation it would be advisable to quickly move to mainly objective criteria. We are where we are, let us make it better and fit for purpose.

©M HEMADRI 

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