The Role of the GMC

Specialty Training:the role of the General Medical Council

The GMC is the independent regulator for doctors in the UK. Its statutory purpose is 'to protect, promote, and maintain the health and safety of the public'. Its job is to ensure that patients can have confidence in doctors. It does this in the exercise of its four main functions:

• setting standards for entry to the medical register;
• keeping up to date registers of qualified doctors;
• determining the principles and values that underpin good medical practice;
• taking firm but fair action where those standards are not met by doctors.

The GMC sets and secures specific standards for all UK undergraduate medical education. It also has a general function to promote high standards and coordinate all stages of medical education. The GMC holds and maintains the Specialist and GP Registers. All doctors wishing to practise medicine in the UK must be registered with the GMC.

GMC requires an annual report by the Postgraduate Dean on behalf of KSS Deanery. Much of the report takes the form of a self assessment against the Generic Standards for Training and the Standards for Deaneries, highlighting areas for development and notable practice. The Annual Report also includes an action plan for the coming year. LABs are expected to produce their own annual reports in the same format as the Postgraduate Dean’s report to GMC, so that issues from around the KSS region can be easily collated. The Annual Reportdraws its information from multiple perspectives, including:

• the annual Contract Review exercise in the region’s NHS Trusts; 
• annual Audit and Review reports from each KSS Deanery LAB;.
• the results of the GMC Annual Surveys (see paragraph below);
• post placements GP trainees’ survey;
• ARCP panel outcomes data;
• specific incident reporting that has taken place during the year, including reports from any Inspection Visits to LEPs, and the action arising from that.

The Annual Report format is available here.

Each year the GMC conducts a national survey of medical trainees. The National Survey of Trainee Doctors provides a picture of what the UK's trainees think about their training. The survey is a vital source of feedback and the information is used to improve the quality of specialty, including GP, training in the UK. The survey asks trainees about the overall quality of training, supervision and experience in their place of work as well as detailed questions about, for example, handover, teaching programmes and workload. Trainees should consider it mandatory to complete the survey as referenced in the GMC document Duties of a doctor.  Completion certificates should form part of evidence at ARCPs.

GMC produces reports on the results. Reports on individual specialties, and on individual LEPs can be accessed here. The reports on specific LEPs can be compared to results across the whole of the UK. KSS Deanery collates these reports to show how trainees feedback by specialty school and by LEP. These show how each aspect of the results relates to the national median. It is expected that in each specialty school and, in each LEP, the local faculty group for a specialty and also the local academic board for the LEP (see Quality below) will consider the results of the survey and produce a commentary explaining the local results and local factors impacting upon them. Each specialty school, local faculty group and local academic board must also respond to its specific survey results through an action plan which forms part of its annual report to KSS Deanery. 

In some cases negative trainee responses to questions in the survey prompt a ‘red flag’ alert and conversely, positive responses prompt a ‘green flag’ in the database. KSS Deanery produces a summary progress report which describes all the actions taken by specific LEPs and specialties to address or explain the problems represented by each red flag.