Regulation and revalidation of doctors

Some readers might have been misled by the subtitle we added to this editorial by Mike Pringle (BMJ 2006;333:161-2, 22 Jul). The subtitle “England's chief medical officer's report should resolve the uncertainty” might suggest that the report (by Sir Liam Donaldson) related only to England. This is not the case. Professor Donaldson is indeed the chief medical officer for England, but the report (and the editorial) concerned medical regulation throughout the United Kingdom (the General Medical Council is the regulatory body and covers all UK countries). The same lack of clarity was evident in the first news article, by Andrew Cole, in the same issue (p 163).