Health conditions at registration

Background

Before being registered as a health professional, an applicant must satisfy the regulators' requirements to establish that they are fit to practise the profession. This includes questions about the applicant’s health.

In 2007 the Disability Rights Commission published Maintaining Standards: Promoting Equality. This report concluded that regulatory bodies having health requirements for those on, or seeking admittance to, their register leads to discrimination and has a negative effect on disabled people’s access to the health professions. They identified this as a barrier to people with impairments and long-term conditions pursuing careers in a number of regulated professions.

The Department of Health commissioned us to provide advice on the use and purpose of the health professional regulatory bodies’ requirements regarding registrants’ health.

Summary

In our report we make five recommendations to the Department of Health and the regulatory bodies on this issue to ensure that health is only considered as part of the requirement to be fit to practise as a health professional, including overhauling the language of ‘good health’ and replace it with a single requirement of fitness to practise and giving the regulatory bodies a single fitness to practise committee.