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E-newsletter - Issue Winter/Spring 2025
13 Mar 2025
Welcome to our Winter/Spring newsletter.
In this issue we are focusing on our Standards Review. You can find out more about this below. We also have the usual updates about key areas of our work, including fitness to practise appeals, performance reviews and Accredited Registers.
In this issue:
- Standards Review: in focus
- Reviewing Right-touch regulation
- Regulatory Data and Artificial Intelligence
- Fitness to Practise appeals update
- Peformance Review update
- Accredited Registers update
- What you might have missed (including meet our new Board members)
- Coming up
Focus on our Standards Review
On 13 February 2024, we launched a three-month consultation on our Standards.
We use our Standards for assessing the performance of organisations that register health and social care practitioners. This includes the 10 health and social care regulators we oversee and the registers that we (re)accredit and are awarded our Quality Mark.
This consultation is an opportunity for patients, service-users, health and care practitioners, regulators and Accredited Registers as well as unions and other professional bodies to tell us what they think about the current Standards. Responses to the consultation will help shape how regulators and Accredited Registers are assessed in the future. It is also a chance to suggest areas that should be looked at which are not covered by our current Standards. For example, those relevant to governance or organisational culture.
The revised Standards are expected to take effect from April 2026.
The consultation closes at 5pm on 8 May 2025.
We asked colleagues “What is the one change you would like to see most as a result of this review?”
“I hope that any revisions made to the Standards will allow for us to perform our statutory functions to the best of our abilities and ensure that we provide even more effective oversight at this critical time in healthcare regulation.”
Akua Dwomoh-Bonsu, Head of Performance Review
“To increase recognition of the Accredited Register programme, the revised Standards must emphasise how they drive safety and quality. This will make the inherent value of the programme and the Accredited Registers easier to understand for employers, commissioners, and patients and service users.”
Osama Ammar, Head of Accreditation
“We would like to see the PSA’s Standards evolve to encourage a more preventative approach to regulation and registration, on the basis of the evidence submitted.”
Dinah Godfree, Head of Policy
The Patients’ perspective on our Standards Review
As our two sets of standards are such vital tools for our oversight work, it is important that we gather views from a broad set of stakeholders as we look to shape the standards for the future. To help with this, we spoke to a few different groups of people before we put together the proposals in our consultation document. Among those groups were patients and service-users. The work we do is aimed at promoting public protection so we were keen to hear what they had to say about our standards. We worked with the Patients Association to run focus groups with patients and service-users. Among other things, they told us they would like to see standards which are accessible and jargon-free as well as ones which promote transparent and empathetic complaints processes.
Find out more about this engagement
Call for evidence
Alongside the consultation, we’ve also put out a call for evidence. This can include published research, data or other evidence which suggests ways professional regulation and registration could improve. This evidence will be used to shape thinking about the future of public protection and the revised Standards.
Improving regulation
Reviewing Right-touch regulation
Right-touch regulation (RTR) is the approach we use in our work, and we encourage others to adopt it as well. This approach involves assessing the level of risk of harm to the public and using that to decide on the most proportionate and effective response. Since our last publication of Right-touch regulation in 2015, significant global changes have impacted regulatory approaches and the role of government in ensuring safety. Given these developments, we believe it's time to update Right-touch regulation.
The revised version – “RTR3” - will address the changes we have seen and ensure regulation keeps pace with societal shifts, enhancing public safety, supporting growth and building trust. This new version will encompass a broad range of regulatory approaches, as outlined in our 2016 paper, Right-touch assurance.
We will be publishing “RTR3” in October 2025. Ahead of that, we have produced a discussion paper and welcome your feedback on it. We are open to making changes to all aspects of RTR. The discussion paper sets out some initial ideas for the changes needed, looking at regulation from a number of different angles. Please feel free to comment on these ideas and to propose any other changes you would like to see discussed in RTR3 that would make regulation more effective.
Read our discussion paper, available on our website
Regulatory Data and Artificial Intelligence Group
We are establishing a new Regulatory Data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) Group to share best practices, identify risks, and discuss barriers and enablers related to the use of AI by regulators. This group will also facilitate collaboration on opportunities to use AI to enhance public protection. We were pleased that this proposal was broadly welcomed by regulators during a recent Policy Forum discussion. We have written to proposed member organisations to request nominees and are planning to hold the first meeting of the Group on 23 April.
Consultation responses
Non-surgical cosmetic procedures
Hardly a day goes by without a story about someone harmed while undergoing a non-surgical cosmetic procedure, such as Botox or fillers. We are concerned about the ongoing, unmanaged risks arising from these treatments and are urging all UK governments to work together to provide a consistent approach. We echoed these sentiments in our response to the Scottish Government’s consultation on regulating non-surgical cosmetic procedures.
Read our response to the Scottish Government
Regulating NHS Managers
We submitted our response to the Government’s consultation on regulation of NHS Managers. The call for regulation of NHS managers has accompanied multiple inquiries and reviews over several decades. But any action needs to be proportionate, targeted and based on a clear understanding of the problem being addressed. Crucially steps should be taken to enhance professional development as well as accountability. This is what PSA’s Chief Executive, Alan Clamp, outlined when he gave his evidence in January to the Thirlwall Inquiry.
Read our response to find out more about our views
Fitness to Practise Appeals
Recent appeals
In the past few months, we have concluded five appeals of regulator final fitness to practise decisions. We appealed these decisions based on our belief that they were insufficient to protect the public. These include cases settled by consent as well as outcomes from recent Court hearings.
The cases we have appealed cover a range of issues, including cases involving:
- a registrant required to be registered with the police after being convicted under the Sexual Offences Act
- a registrant whose clinical failings contributed to the death of a patient’s unborn baby
- a registrant who behaved inappropriately towards a male colleague
- a registrant who behaved inappropriately towards three female colleagues.
We also appealed two cases where the process/requirements set out in legislation were not followed.
Read more about these appeals on our website
Fitness to Practise Learning Points
We have just published Issue 2 of our Learning Points bulletin and circulated it to the regulators. We share learning points with the aim of helping regulators to improve the quality of their fitness to practise panel outcomes and to drive up standards in their decision-making. We have continued to see an increase in the volume of cases relating to sexual misconduct. Therefore Issue 2 of the Bulletin also focused on this theme and included:
- common themes arising from our grounds of appeal in sexual misconduct cases
- themes arising from learning points in sexual misconduct cases
- an overview of recent successful appeals and cases settled by consent in this area.
Performance Review update
We published our monitoring report for the General Dental Council (GDC) on 18 December 2024. The GDC met 16 out of 18 Standards: not meeting Standard 3 on Equality, Diversity and Inclusion; nor Standard 15 on fitness to practise timeliness. We did not feel sufficiently reassured that the GDC was meeting three of the four outcomes required as part of our new approach to Standard 3 (introduced at the start of this review year). The GDC also did not meet Standard 15 as we concluded that fitness to practise investigations were taking too long.
We published our monitoring report for the General Medical Council (GMC) on 20 December 2024. The GMC met all 18 Standards. Find out more details in our report about areas for improvement as well as how the GMC is improving its fitness to practise timeliness.
We published a monitoring report for the General Optical Council (GOC) on 3 March. The GOC met all 18 Standards. Our report outlines how the GOC met Standard 3 and the examples of good practice we saw while carrying out our review, including using staff networks to embed EDI, sharing learning about EDI and widening participation through its annual education reports; and using the findings of its registrant and public perceptions surveys to inform its work.
NMC Performance Review 2023/24 – we have just published an update about when we plan to publish the NMC’s review.
Nursing and Midwifery Council Independent Oversight Group
The Independent Oversight Group (IOG) was set up in September 2024 after the Government asked us to oversee and support the NMC’s response to serious concerns about its culture and governance.
The Group met five times between September 2024 and the end of January and continues to meet. After each meeting we publish a summary. These can be found on our website alongside more details of the Group’s members and terms of reference.
Find out more about the NMC IOG
Accredited Registers Update
Accredited Registers Seminar 2025
We held our annual Accredited Registers (AR) seminar on 25 February. The seminar was a chance to think about the future of the standards, the AR programme and how we would, together, take them forward.
The first half of the day was taken up with a discussion on the Standards consultation. We wanted to share views and help Accredited Registers formulate their responses before the survey closes on 8 May 2025.
Attendees were then asked to co-create a tool that will shape the development of the programme through shared objectives and collaborative efforts over the coming years. This work will lay the foundations for the next three annual business plans for the programme with a focus on how we can grow the programme in both scale and impact.
What you may have missed
Meet our new Board members
We were pleased to welcome two new Board members from Scotland and Northern Ireland. Ali Jarvis and Geraldine Campbell joined the PSA’s Board on 1 January 2025.
Recent blogs
We’ve published three blogs so far this year, including:
- Regulation: part of the solution, not the problem
- New Year, New Opportunities: embracing change in health and care
- Barriers to complaints: what are they and how can we break them down?
Coming up:
Exploring how professional regulation can promote a safety culture
This is our eighth Regulatory Developments and the Welsh Context Seminar and will take place online on 25 March. Find out more about the event, including how to get in touch if you would like to attend, from our website.
Sexual misconduct webinars: new date added
We held the latest webinar in our series on sexual misconduct on Tuesday, 4 March. If you have missed any of these, we will be hosting more webinars later in the year. Find out more about the series to date and how to sign up if you are interested in attending future seminars. We have just added a new date, 26 March, find out more from our website.
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