Professional Standards Authority for Health and Social Care

and i said that can't be right you know the i would imagine the nhs has very strict protocols regarding this and uh my my friend took a sip of her coffee and raised an eyebrow and we moved on to a different subject so i think you're right ken i think organizations now if they're they're an organizational member of the bacp or or or they're working um with with people who are members of the BACP.

And I'm going to pause there because I think as the rest of the professional bodies that sit under the Professional Standards Authority umbrella start to roll out their updates, I was with the NCPS um a couple of days ago and they were they were telling us um at a regional conference they were saying that their new framework will be coming out soon i suspect there will be quite an alignment along the bodies so we're talking particularly about the bacp here but i can see this uh kind of cascading across everyone's ethical framework And I do think it's a good thing.

And I do acknowledge that maybe for the hard-pressed charity that's relying on small amounts of money from the government or the local council and donations, that they're going to be sitting there thinking, well, I just don't know we can do this.

I understand that.

It cannot explain why the regulators has such a list of wider failures.

The Independent Professional Standards Authority, who regulate the regulators, recorded, and I linked to it this morning, a median of 145 weeks from referral to hearing in October to December in 2025.

145 weeks, that's nearly three years.

These are people's lives measured in a regulator's reporting periods.

Frankly, the PSA, the Professional Standards Authority, is next to useless.

It can only point to failures and publish evidence and alert ministers.

It's a toothless watchdog dressed up in a party frock playing pass the parcel.

Nurses, midwives, and other registered professionals are in line to get a shared set of principles on using AI at work.

The Nursing and Midwifery Councils agreed to develop them with the Professional Standards Authority and other regulators in response to the National Commission on AI regulation that reported earlier this month.

The General Dental Council made its own commitment in the same day on agreeing terms of ethical use of AI.

The Treasury's estimated the lifetime benefits of the federated data platform at 808 million this month.

Now, this is all about how quickly, uh, or not the GPhC resolves its fitness to practice cases, and it, it's an ongoing issue for the regulator that we've, we've discussed before on the pod.

Now, it's important to stress, uh, right from the outset that the GPhC's overall performance is actually pretty good, uh, in the eyes of its watchdog, the Professional Standards Authority, which, uh, this week found that the regulator met 17 out of 18 standards in its most recent performance review.

And on paper, that's pretty impressive, right? Um, but my bad week still goes to the GPhC, not because it failed across the board, but because the one standard that it missed, and it continues to miss, goes, um, right to the heart of what I think a regulator i- is there to do.

And on the timeliness of its fitness to practice investigations, um, the regulator, uh, has failed to meet this standard, GPhC's failed to meet this standard since 2018-19.

We don't need them.

We'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll merge regulatory, healthcare regulatory bodies to s- to save money." Um, and I know the Care Quality Commission were mooted as a potential replacement for the GPhC.

I'm not saying that's gonna resurface again, but it's, it's quite worrying that, you know, this is still oc- occurring, and now the health secretary has been personally, um, told about this by the Professional Standards Authority.

Yeah, the, the threat of a super regulator's never really gone away, has it, Neil? So, um, well, we'll see what Yvette Cooper makes of it, uh, I suppose.