Professional Health Regulation in the Public Interest

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Quality Assurance ◽  
Public Interest ◽  
Health Professionals ◽  
Health Professions ◽  
Regulatory Reform ◽  
Healthcare Systems ◽  
Reform Agenda ◽  
The Public ◽  
Professional Health ◽  
Sociology Of Health

There are significant variations in how healthcare systems and health professionals are regulated globally. One feature that they increasingly have in common is an emphasis on the value of including members of the public in quality assurance processes. While many argue that this will help better serve the public interest, others question how far the changing regulatory reform agenda is still dominated by medical interests. Bringing together leading academics worldwide, this collection compares and critically examines the ways in which different countries are regulating healthcare in general, and health professions in particular, in the interest of users and the wider public. It is the first book in the Sociology of Health Professions series.

scholarly journals Protecting the Public Interest when Regulating Health Professionals Providing Virtual Care: A Scoping Review Protocol

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen Leslie ◽  
Sophia Myles ◽  
Tracey L Adams ◽  
Catharine Schiller ◽  
Jacob Shelley ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Scoping Review ◽  
Public Interest ◽  
Health Professionals ◽  
Digital Health ◽  
Grey Literature ◽  
Regulatory Reform ◽  
Health Profession ◽  
Rapid Expansion ◽  
The Public ◽  
Virtual Care

Abstract Background: Virtual care is transforming the nature of healthcare, particularly with the accelerated shift to telehealth and virtual care during the COVID-19 pandemic. Health profession regulators face intense pressures to safely facilitate this type of healthcare while upholding their legislative mandate to protect the public. Challenges for health profession regulators have included providing practice guidance for virtual care, changing entry to practice requirements to include digital competencies, facilitating interjurisdictional virtual care through licensure and liability insurance requirements, and adapting disciplinary procedures. This scoping review will examine the literature on how the public interest is protected when regulating health professionals providing virtual care.Methods: This review will follow the Joanna Briggs Institute (JBI) scoping review methodology. Academic and grey literature will be retrieved from health sciences, social sciences, and legal databases using a comprehensive search strategy underpinned by Population-Concept-Context (PCC) inclusion criteria. Articles published in English since January 2015 will be considered for inclusion. Two reviewers will independently screen titles and abstracts and full-text sources against specific inclusion and exclusion criteria. Discrepancies will be resolved through discussion or by a third reviewer. One research team member will extract relevant data from the selected documents and a second will validate the extractions.Discussion: Results will be presented in a descriptive synthesis that highlights implications for regulatory policy and professional practice, as well as study limitations and knowledge gaps that warrant further research. Given the rapid expansion of virtual care provision by regulated health professionals in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, mapping the literature on how the public interest is protected in this rapidly evolving digital health sector may help inform future regulatory reform and innovation.Review registration: This protocol is registered with the Open Science Framework (10.17605/OSF.IO/BD2ZX).

Introduction: professional health regulation in the public interest

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
John Martyn Chamberlain
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
Public Interest ◽  
Public Involvement ◽  
Third Party ◽  
Reform Agenda ◽  
The Public ◽  
Liberal Societies ◽  
Healthcare Work ◽  
Professional Health ◽  
Complex Relationships

This chapter provides a commentary on, and introduces, the collection of papers in this volume. It begins by outlining how professional forms of health care expertise have become increasingly subject over the last four decades to third-party scrutiny, as well as how we have witnessed greater public involvement in the monitoring and quality assurance of healthcare work, particularly in Western neo-liberal societies. It then discusses how these changes have led the ‘social closure’ model of professional work to become revised, and in doing so how this raises concerns regarding academic engagement with members of the public as part of a broader patient advocacy and policy reform agenda focused on the promotion of the public interest. This discussion helps set the scene for subsequent chapters, which together seek to unpack the complex relationships that exist between health care practitioners, civil society, the state and professional groups in a variety of different international borders and regulatory jurisdictions. In doing so, each author seeks to explore critically how calls for increased efficiency and cost effectiveness in healthcare are balanced with the need to promote the public interest through providing citizens with essential health services.

scholarly journals Occupational citizenship

2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lise Rosendal Østergaard
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Health Care ◽  
Burkina Faso ◽  
Health Professionals ◽  
Health Workers ◽  
Material Deprivation ◽  
Public Health Care ◽  
The Public ◽  
Political Agitation ◽  
Professional Health

Health workers are an overlooked category in the growing literature on health and citizenship. In this article I describe a 2012–2013 nationwide conflict in the public health care sector in Burkina Faso to explore how ideas about citizenship were mobilized in a situation of political agitation. I examine how public health care is done in a context of material deprivation, technological shortage, and great demand from the population. Three distinct repertoires of practice, routine, and bureaucracy are identified, through which health workers strive to make meaning of their work and engage in the practice of public health care. Drawing on these findings, I argue that adopting a citizenship framework offers an opportunity to improve our understanding of the multiple ways in which health workers manage the difficulties related to being (health professionals) and doing (professional health care) in rural Burkina Faso.

“Better Regulation Yes – De-regulation No.”: A Trade Union's Perspective on the Regulatory Reform Agenda in the UK

2011 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 263-265 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Veale
Keyword(s):  
Regulatory Reform ◽  
Advisory Council ◽  
Insurance Companies ◽  
Environment Protection ◽  
Reform Agenda ◽  
The Public ◽  
Better Regulation ◽  
Public Risk ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The Impact

Good regulation is essential, to protect employees, consumers and the public, as well as the environment. To argue that the market should be allowed to be the determinant of working conditions, together with a bit of exhortation to employers to behave decently, is to accept the Victorian approach that allowed children to work in coal mines.The massive problems in the finance sector recently also show only too well the impact of weak regulation and de-regulation.That said, Governments do not always get it right when they do regulate and there is undoubtedly some regulation that is no longer necessary, or is out of date, or is over-complicated or hard to enforce. Neither have Governments showed themselves to be very good at assessing public risk or balancing public health and environment protection with innovation and growth. As the former Risk and Regulation Advisory Council suggested, risk is often assessed through the prism of media sensationalism, political point scoring, civil service attachment to legislation and “risk mongers” such as insurance companies that have a vested interest in talking up risk.

Regulation of Professionals and Facilities in Europe

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deirdre Madden
Keyword(s):  
Patient Safety ◽  
Public Interest ◽  
Healthcare Systems ◽  
Regulatory Mechanisms ◽  
The Public ◽  
Balancing Of Interests

This chapter is an overview of the regulation of healthcare in Europe. It demonstrates that regulatory mechanisms in Europe are not straightforward given the complexity of healthcare systems, the balancing of interests involved, the need to avoid political agendas taking priority over the public interest, and the financial and bureaucratic cost of compliance. Right-touch regulation in all sectors tries to strike an appropriate and proportionate balance between liberty and safety, between freedom to innovate and public protection, but the stakes are perhaps higher in healthcare than in other areas due to the potential consequences involved. However, the chapter shows how the increasing level of participation of public interest or lay representatives on regulatory boards and statutory authorities may go some way to providing the public with assurance of the independence of these bodies and their prioritisation of patient safety above all else, but much also depends on the statutory framework underpinning the work of these bodies and the extent to which they are mandated to be rigorous, independent, effective champions of the public interest. Much work has been done in this context, but, as the chapter shows, there remains much more to do.

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