Has the GMC gone Woke?
The UK General Medical Council (GMC), the doctors’ regulatory body, used to have a pithy aphorism to indicate what it does: ‘Guiding doctors, protecting patients.’ This was subsequently changed to ‘Guiding doctors. Ensuring good medical practice.’
I am sure doctors are sometimes in need of guidance, and doubtless there are occasions when patients may need to be protected from doctors’ mistakes or wrongdoing.
That was then. But what are the current objectives of the GMC? They’re set out like this:
We work with doctors, patients, and other stakeholders to support good, safe patient care. (Groan.)
Couldn’t they leave out the wretched word, stakeholders? And if the GMC supports good patient care, we may assume it will also by safe. Thus, the objectives of the GMC could be simplified to: ‘We work with doctors to promote good patient care.’
When I qualified in medicine in 1968, I had to pay a one-off fee, as I recall, of £15 (worth about £145 today) to the GMC to be included in the list of registered medical practitioners – a legal requirement to practise medicine in the UK. After a few years the rules changed and a fee needed to be paid annually. Even though I immigrated to Japan in 1984, I kept up this payment to be recognised as a qualified doctor in the UK. Then the rules changed yet again, and in 2012 one needed to pay an additional fee for a ‘licence to practice’. This proved too complicated for me to comply with so I let it lapse, but I have continued to pay an annual fee to be included in the Medical Register, though without a licence to practise.
Now I’m coming to the point. Recently, before paying my annual registration fee, I was asked to confirm my details – address, etc. Fair enough. But in addition, I was obliged to answer a number of highly personal and intrusive questions about equality and diversity, the answers to which were indicated as required. These were about ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, and any physical or mental disability such as depression. However, one could select a response in each case as ‘prefer not to say’, which of course is the one I selected. Thus, the answers to these questions were not required after all.
The GMC tries to justify asking such questions with the following statements:
Collecting equality and diversity data is standard practice for most organisations.
It may be, but so what?
There is existing evidence that some of these characteristics may have an impact on how fairly professionals such as doctors, are treated. (My emphasis. The words ‘existing’ and ‘professionals such as’ are superfluous.)
So, the GMC wants to protect doctors from being unfairly treated. How touching!
Updating your information will help us develop a more accurate picture of the whole profession, so we can better understand the different experiences of diverse groups of doctors. It will also allow us to act on any issues or trends that emerge.
If I want tell the GMC my experiences I’ll do so; I don’t want to be asked these intrusive questions routinely, or even it seems, as a condition for continuing my registration.
The GMC also tries to justify why it asks these questions with the following statements:
The GMC is committed to treating everyone fairly and meeting our legal responsibilities under the Equality Act 2010 and related legislation (such as the Human Rights Act 1998). One of the ways we do this is by asking people to provide information about their ethnicity, disability, gender, sexual orientation, religion and beliefs.
There is no logical connection between these two sentences. And if I need the GMC’s help for me to be treated fairly, I’ll ask for it.
Text © Gabriel Symonds
Picture credit: Wikimedia Commons. (Dr Frederick Axham was struck off from the Medical Register in 1911 for collaborating with a medically unqualified bone-setter.)