Regulation of Health and Social Care Professionals Consultation

6.31 The Health Professions Council has powers to annotate its register to record
post-registration qualifications or additional competencies, approve postregistration
qualifications for these purposes, approve and establish standards of
education and training for post-registration qualification, and produce standards
of proficiency or their functional equivalent. 25 Currently it annotates its register to
indicate where a registrant has undertaken additional training on medicines and
has obtained entitlements to supply, administer or prescribe these medicines.
The Council is required to do this under the Prescriptions Only (Human Use)
Order 1997. 26 The register is annotated where:
(1) a chiropodist/podiatrist, physiotherapist or radiographer has completed
an approved programme enabling them to become a supplementary
prescriber; and
(2) a chiropodist/podiatrist has completed an approved programme allowing
them to sell or supply prescription only medicines and/or administer local
anaesthetics. 27
6.32 Some regulators do not have powers to establish or have decided not to
implement quality assurance systems for post-registration qualifications. This is
often on the basis that post-registration qualifications are undertaken by
individuals who are already statutorily registered and therefore work within a
regulatory framework, or that the practitioner’s area of practice would not alter
substantially or pose a risk to the public as a result of post-registration
qualifications. The White Paper Trust, Assurance and Safety argued that for the
non-medical health professions, post-registration qualifications should be
recorded in the register only in cases “where these are relevant to patient care,
risk management and are at a level substantially beyond the requirements for
basic registration”. 28
Statutory committees
6.33 For many regulators, statutory committees are given a key role in the regulatory
function of overseeing professional education. For example, the General Optical
Council’s Education Committee and Standards Committee are given important
roles by the Opticians Act 1989 in giving advice and assistance to the General
Council on matters relating to education and training. For instance, the Council
must consult its Standards Committee when establishing the competencies which
a person must be able to demonstrate in order to be granted a qualification as an
optometrist or a dispensing optician and the Education Committee when
establishing the content and the standard of education and training required for
the purpose of achieving those competencies. 29 The Health Professions Council’s
Education and Training Committee is required to advise the Council (whether on
25 Health Professions Order 2001, SI 2002 No 254, arts 2(4) and 19(6).
26 SI 1997 No 1830. Issued under the Medicines Act 1968.
27
Health Professions (Parts of and Entries in the Register) Order of Council 2003, SI 2003
No 1571, art 6.
28
Trust, Assurance and Safety – the Regulation of the Health Professions in the 21 Century
(2007) Cm 7013, para 6.12.
29 Opticians Act 1989, s 12(2).
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