Health Professionals: EEA and Non-EEA Citizens

Lord Kakkar Excerpts

Thursday 8th September 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kakkar]

My Lords, I join other noble Lords in congratulating the noble Viscount on having secured this important debate. I will confine my remarks to medical practitioners and declare my interest as a practising surgeon.

For practitioners who have qualified outside the European Union, the situation is clear: our national regulatory body, the General Medical Council, is obliged to test their language skills and competency and is fully entitled to inquire into the content and quality of their medical education and training. For practitioners from the European Union, this is not the case: the GMC is not able to test language skills, is unable to make an assessment of their competency and is unable to inquire into their training and education. Clearly this is not acceptable, but the situation is worse even than that because, for practitioners who are registered elsewhere in the European Union and who, as we have heard, are entitled to come to the United Kingdom and practise, and for whom the General Medical Council is obliged to provide the opportunity for automatic registration, there is no obligation on the part of their home regulatory bodies to report any concerns that they may have about the practice of the individual—whether they have been suspended or whether there are any inquiries into their practice. That is an intolerable situation. It is not right for fellow practitioners who have to work with these individuals, but most of all it is not right for the citizens of our country who, at times when they are unwell and are becoming patients in our healthcare system, need to be absolutely certain that the practitioners to whom they are exposed are competent, meet the standards required of medical practitioners in our country and therefore can, with certainty, provide the quality of care that citizens in our country deserve.

There is a simple way forward. On language testing, I understand that a change in domestic legislation will allow immediately for the General Medical Council to move forward and assume responsibility for ensuring language competence. On professional competence, there will need to be changes at the European level. I know that the General Medical Council—and I am sure medical practitioners in our country—would warmly encourage the Government to pursue discussions at a European level of professional competence training, but in the mean time it would be most helpful if Her Majesty’s Government would consider looking at language testing and determining whether a change to domestic legislation could ensure that that particular problem is overcome. Ultimately this should not be a matter of politics or even of European relations: it is simply a matter of patient safety and providing for the people of our country the certainty they deserve in knowing that when they are unwell, the practitioners who will look after them all meet the same standard, whether they have been trained in the United Kingdom, in a European country or elsewhere in the world.