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A ‘statement of principles’ drawn up by the GMC in response to Sir Liam Donaldson’s report ‘Good Doctors, Safer Patients’, suggested a balanced make-up of the council from the public, doctors, medical educators and doctors’ employers. The rebalancing is designed to boost public and medical confidence in the GMC.  

The Donaldson report recommended that council members be independently appointed by the Public Appointments Commission and that the composition should be changed to become more ‘board-like’.  

GMC president Sir Graeme Catto said: ‘We have abandoned the term self-regulation in favour of professionally-led regulation in partnership with the public. What we need is independent regulation.  

‘We had a medical majority, but doctors have not expressed much confidence,’ he added.  

The GMC’s position statement admitted that ‘the professional majority on the council undermines confidence in our independence and impacts adversely on our ability to regulate effectively’. The position statement was circulated to council members last week as a confidential document before Sir Graeme sanctioned its release in order to elicit the views of the profession.  

The GMC has welcomed the requirement that it is accountable to parliament.  

The GMC has said Sir Liam’s plans to separate responsibility for education, standards and fitness-to-practise adjudication from other regulatory functions amount to a fragmentation of regulation that is ‘unnecessary, unjustified and likely to cause profound damage to future patient care’.  

The GMC is worried that the state would become responsible for setting and adjudicating on medical educational standards and standards of practice.  

Under Sir Liam’s plans, the GMC would relinquish oversight of medical education to the Postgraduate Medical Education and Training Board. But the GMC has insisted it can only be held accountable for the medical register if it can control entry onto it.  

Council members are also angry at the suggestion the burden of proof should be changed from criminal to civil when a doctor’s livelihood is at stake.  

‘Where a doctor is facing erasure from the register, the panel making the decision must be sure of its facts,’ it says.  

The GMC will go public on its responses to ‘Good Doctors, Safer Patients’ in an attempt to stimulate doctors and the public to send in submissions.  

The consultation finishes on 10 November.