Representatives of the United Kingdom's 32000 senior hospital doctors have overwhelmingly passed a vote of no confidence in the General Medical Council “as currently constituted and functioning.” At the annual senior staffs conference last week, speakers cited the backlog in dealing with cases, the election of an antiestablishment candidate in the recent byelection (20 May, p 1357), poor media relations, and the GMC's proposals on revalidation (p 1607).
Mr Peter Terry, a consultant obstetrician and gynaecologist in Aberdeen, described the GMC as “dysfunctional, arrogant, and inefficient.” Mr Terry said the body was failing to protect self regulation, and yet if doctors lost their majority on the council, regulatory responsibilities would pass to politicians. Dr Peter Hawker, who chairs the BMA's consultants' committee, said that the GMC seemed to have lost touch with the public, parliament, and the profession, and he believed that the revalidation proposals would be potentially intrusive and threatening.
One of the deputy chairmen, Mr Derek Machin, said that the GMC's proposals were being pushed through by a president who he described as “a mis-guided, elderly, retired” doctor who would never be subject to the procedures. A consultant anaesthetist in Reading, Dr Jonathan Fielden, said that a “cabal” had been leading the GMC and pushing the politicians' agenda. If its proposals on revalidation were adopted, doctors would have to go through a series of hoops which would take them away from their patients.
The president of the Royal College of General Practitioners, Sir Denis Pereira Gray, claimed that it would be a “crass mistake” to pass the motion when no alternative arrangement was being proposed. Dr John Chisholm, chairman of the BMA's GPs' committee, had written to 34000 GPs urging them to accept the process of revalidation under the aegis of the GMC, and if the motion was passed British medicine would be divided for the first time since 1838. “You will split hospital doctors from GPs,” warned Sir Denis.