Volume 1

The regulation of private and other independent healthcare : fifth report / Health Committee.

  • Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons. Health Committee.
Date:
1999
Catalogue details

Licence: Open Government Licence

Credit: The regulation of private and other independent healthcare : fifth report / Health Committee. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    58/68 (page 56)
    9. A reliance on word of mouth notification and retrospective reminders seem to us inadequate measures to ensure the MHAC comprehensively covers the patients it should. We believe that the grant of registration of a mental nursing home to receive detained patients should be notified, as a matter of course, to the Commission. We recommend that this should be a regulatory requirement (paragraph 74). 10. We recommend that an independent regulator should have the powers to remove the authority of a mental nursing home to receive patients detained under a section of the Mental Health Act if the person registered is failing to comply with the requirements of the Mental Health Act. In these circumstances, the continued accommodation of a detained patient in such a home would be unlawful and necessitate their removal to an appropriately registered premises. We believe that the presence of a power to remove the authority to receive detained patients would be sufficient, in most circumstances, to ensure compliance with the requirements of good practice so that patients such as those described at paragraph 64 above would have the right to appeal (paragraph 75). 11. We welcome the review of the Mental Health Act currently in progress and recommend that the role, powers and resources of the Mental Health Act Commission should be reviewed with a view to their extension to cover all designated mental health services (paragraph 76). 12. We recommend that the Mental Health Act Commission should make its reports available to an agency serving both the Regional Commissions for Care Standards and the regulatory body we propose for acute independent services and that it should have representation on the national level of these regulatory bodies (paragraph 77). 13. We recommend that the independent health regulator ensures that inspection teams have appropriately trained and experienced personnel to assess thoroughly the needs of children being treated in the independent sector and to ensure that such needs are met by staff holding the relevant qualifications for treating children even if their treatment forms only a small proportion of a hospital’s activity (paragraph 82). 14. We recommend that the Government reviews the current arrangements for transmission of information between private and NHS GPs. We believe that the GMC should assess whether there are treatments and procedures which clinicians should be precluded from administering without access to a full patient medical history. We also believe that patients need to be warned that, if they consent to medical treatment by clinicians who do not have access to their medical records, they may run a considerable risk. This warning should be given verbally and in written form, with a form of words approved by the Department. Patients should be made aware of the strict confidentiality procedures that apply in the NHS, and that breaches of confidentiality will normally result in dismissal (paragraph 89). 15. We believe that a national moderator will be required to assess whether emerging techniques and technologies pose any risk to patient safety. We recommend that, in addition to those invasive techniques currently subject to regulation, other procedures defined by the moderator should also be regulated. It is important that the list should be kept up to date; in our view the Department’s failure to maintain and update the 1984 Act in this regard is unacceptable. We recommend that the list should be capable of alteration by secondary rather than primary legislation, and that the Moderator reviews the list at least annually (paragraph 90).