Professional regulation in primary care: improving quality and safety ... we hope.

There was a lot of discussion about strengthening professional regulation five or so years ago – but now it really does seem to be happening. So far so good. There seems to be a general confidence that revalidation will be about improving and maintaining individual practitioners’ performance rather than focusing on specific faults. It will hopefully be about enhancing the quality of care and safety of patients, rather than a bureaucratic exercise for health professionals that takes yet more time and energy away from patient care. The primary purpose of professional regulation is to ensure patient safety. Box 1 describes the various purposes of revalidation for general practitioners (GPs). So the clinical governance framework in all healthcare settings must ensure that individual practitioners provide minimally acceptable standards of care in terms of the safety and quality of care.