Speaking at the BMA's Annual Representatives Meeting (ARM), Dr Keith Brent, deputy chairman of the BMA’s Central Consultants and Specialists Committee (CCSC), said doctors are ‘not above scrutiny’ but said consideration should be given to an alternative model for regulation.

Dr Brent said that clinical governance systems in the NHS should be boosted, so problems can be identified as they are starting to arise. ‘[We need] a system that puts funding, brains, time and energy into trying to get clinical governance right,' he said.

‘Lets get the system checks right first, before we get every single doctor in the country to prove they are not a murderer or a rapist.’

But BMA chairman Dr Hamish Meldrum said that revalidation is about an element of clinical governance in organisations, and also individual responsibility. ‘I think we should be focussing on both, not just one or the other. How that focus is applied is what we are fighting to make sure is reasonable.’

The motion that called for the BMA to ‘actively oppose’ current plans for revalidation and campaign for a focus on effective systems of clinical governance, not individual doctors, was carried as reference.

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