General Optical Council

Reforming optical regulation

What is the White Paper?
The Government’s recent White Paper, ‘Trust, Assurance & Safety: The Regulation of Health Professionals in the 21st Century’ sets out a series of proposals for reforming healthcare regulation.

The GOC has welcomed the White Paper and we are now committed to working with Government to implement its recommendations.

The White Paper sets out five key principles. Statutory healthcare regulation should:

• Have an overriding interest in the safety and quality of care that patients receive from health professionals. 
• Sustain the confidence of both the public and professions through demonstrable impartiality.
• Regulators need to be independent of government, the professionals themselves, employers, educators and all the other interest groups involved in healthcare. 
• Be as much about sustaining, improving and assuring the professional standards of the overwhelming majority of health professionals as it is about identifying and addressing poor practice or bad behaviour. 
• Not create unnecessary burdens, but be proportionate to the risk it addresses and the benefits it brings. 
• The system must ensure the strength and integrity of health professionals within the UK. But it must be flexible enough to work effectively for the different needs and approaches across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, as well as to adapt to future changes.

What are we doing?
We have established a White Paper implementation project group. The group consists of four work streams focusing on: 

• Governance
• Revalidation 
• Tackling concerns 
• Registration

The work streams are led by an overarching Project Board that consults our stakeholders as implementation develops.

What are the changes?
We have already agreed to propose reducing the size of Council to a maximum of 13 members. This move is in line with the White Paper recommendation that regulatory bodies should become smaller and more ‘board-like’.

A new Independent Adjudication body will be established, which is expected to manage fitness to practise hearings from 2010. We have given our formal support for this move.