to accept the appropriateness of that, at least as far as medicine was concerned,
stating:
`An instructive way of looking at professional self-regulation is to see it as a
contract between public and professions, by which the public go to the pro-
fession for medical treatment because the profession has made sure it will
provide satisfactory treatment.'It also stated as crucial, for the self-respect of professionals, that they should
regulate themselves.
Is it any wonder that Celia Davies [5], earnestly grappling with the need to
introduce radical change in matters of regulation, describes the modest changes
.modest in that they did not challenge the fundamental structures) leaving us with
`A Nineteenth Century Idea in a Twenty First Century Setting'. She also makes a
valuable contribution to the debate about professional regulation now taking
place, contending that:
`As each professional group seeks a more secure and respected place, so it has
developed institutions that mirror or mimic those of medicine ± something that
has the potential as much to pull the care delivery team apart as to bring its
members together.'Truly effective reform of the regulation of the health professions cannot therefore
be achieved unless they are also considered as part of the same reform package. It
is, after all, the same people who depend on their practitioners' competence and
conduct.
3.3.1 The challenge to systems of professional regulation
It was only after Parliament, through amending legislation in 1969, had granted to
the GMC the power to levy an annual fee on all persons on its register,
precipitating a professional revolt that brought a threat to the medical staffing of
the National Health Service, that any UK Government seemed to take the issue of
professional regulation seriously. Even then, in 1972, in announcing the estab-
lishment of a committee of enquiry, the then Secretary of State, Sir Keith Joseph,
effectively limited its impact at the outset by stating that, `The General Medical
Council is a body with a notable record of service to the public and the profession.
It is not contemplated that the profession should be regulated other than by a
predominantly professional body' [6].
In other words, professional regulation itself was not to be called into question.
Twenty years later, when taking legislation .the Nurses, Midwives and Health
Visitors Bill) to revise the regulatory structure for nursing through the House of
Commons, another Secretary of State, Virginia Bottomley, said that the principle of
professional self-regulation was not in question. She reinforced this, once the
legislation had received the Royal Assent, by appointing only two genuinely lay
persons to the 60 member Council.
The years subsequent to 1975 have faced the GMC with criticism and challenges
of a different sort and principally from outside the profession. In 1988, through
the organisation Health Rights, Jean Robinson ± at the time one of the lay members
36 Nursing Law and Ethics