Examination of Witnesses (Questions 618-619)
PROFESSOR PETER
RUBIN, PROFESSOR
NEIL DOUGLAS
AND PROFESSOR
SIR NICK
WRIGHT
24 JANUARY 2008
Q618 Chairman: Could I first of all welcome
you and then ask you to give us your names and the current positions
that you hold.
Professor Rubin: Professor Peter
Rubin and I am here as Chairman of PMETB.
Professor Douglas: Neil Douglas,
President of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. Here,
I believe, as past chairman of the MTAS Review Group.
Q619 Chairman: I have an interest
to declare. I do know Peter Rubin. I am a lay member of the General
Medical Council and Peter sits on the Medical Council as Chair
of its Education Committee. Perhaps I could start by asking a
couple of questions about the role of PMETB. It began work in
2005, the year the first MMC reforms were introduced. Was PMETB
set up specifically to provide quality assurance for the MMC reforms
or was the timing an absolute coincidence?
Professor Rubin: The timing was
largely coincidence. I should qualify that by saying that I was
not involved in the establishment of PMETB. I came on the scene
somewhat later than the establishment process, which was earlier
on. Inquiries and reviews going back to 1970 recommended that
postgraduate medical education should be regulated, as undergraduate
medical education has been since 1858. The most recent of those
reviews was the Bristol heart inquiry and in that review Ian Kennedy
very clearly recommended that postgraduate education should be
regulated and PMETB was a consequence. MMC was developing in parallel
with all that. One of the issues that has been all too apparent
to us is that, because the MMC came on the scene at much the same
time, there has been a lot of confusion about what the two organisations
do.
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