Select Committee on Health Minutes of Evidence


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.


 
previous page contents next page

House of Commons home page Parliament home page House of Lords home page search page enquiries index

© Parliamentary copyright 2008
Prepared 8 May 2008