Statutory Regulation

The Department of Health's report The Regulation of the non-medical healthcare professions (July 2006) defines regulation as the set of systems and activities intended to ensure that healthcare practitioners have the necessary knowledge, skills, attitudes and behaviours to provide healthcare safely. This encompasses activity undertaken by individual professionals, teams, employers, regulatory bodies and other organisations.

The core activities of regulation are listed in the Health Act (1999) as:

1. Keeping the register of members admitted to practice
2. Determining standards of education and training for admission to practice
3. Giving advice about standards of conduct and performance
4. Administering procedures (including making rules) relating to misconduct, unfitness to practise and similar matters.

The prime purpose of professional regulation is public protection. Whilst there will also be considerable benefits for the professionals in the production of visible standards, the professionals themselves are not the main focus of regulation - the focus lies with the consumer.

Professional regulation becomes statutory regulation at the point where the State regards it as so important for public safety that it legislates for a ban on either using the professional title or doing certain things unless your name appears in the register. This protects patients from the harm caused by people practising a profession which they are not fit to. It engenders public confidence by allowing members of the public and the employers of professionals to check on a person's registration status, knowing that the information they find will be correct and up to date.

Currently the Government is awaiting publication of the Extending Professional Regulation Review (due February 2009). The Extending Professional Regulation Working Group will make recommendations about the criteria by which emerging health care roles will be judged to determine whether they should be regulated and to make recommendations about existing non-regulated healthcare roles. It is anticipated that the Department of Health will publish a consultation document on the statutory regulation of herbal/traditional medicine practitioners, acupuncturists and traditional Chinese medicine practitioners alongside this Extending Professional Regulation report. The consultation period will last three months after which the department of Health must assess and publish the responses received.

In 2000 a Report of the House of Lords’ Select Committee on Science and Technology on Complementary and Alternative Medicine advised that “acupuncture and herbal medicine are the two therapies which are at a stage where it would be of benefit to them and their patients if practitioners strive for statutory regulation and we recommend that they should do so.” (Section 5.53)

The Report to Ministers from the Department of Health Steering Group on the Statutory Regulation of Practitioners of Acupuncture, Herbal Medicine, Traditional Chinese Medicine and Other Traditional Medicine Systems Practised in the UK was published in May 2008. The report says “The Steering Group is of the view that there is an urgent need to proceed without delay with the statutory regulation of practitioners of acupuncture, herbal medicine, traditional Chinese medicine and other traditional medicine systems.”

Please click here to view the Association's response to the Department of Health's consultation on statutory regulation.