Health committee demands change in laws that prevent medical regulators giving language tests to European medics
The next government must "as a matter of extreme urgency" demand changes to a 2005 EU directive governing the free movement of labour in an effort to prevent more deaths at the hands of incompetent foreign GPs, senior MPs said today.
New ministers should also promise to change UK laws which "goldplated" European rules and prevented medical regulators giving language tests to European doctors, according to a critical report on out-of-hours services by the Commons health select committee.
The report criticised NHS bodies for failing to use other vetting powers, noting that no disciplinary action had been taken against an NHS body that did not check the English language skills of Daniel Ubani, a German doctor who unlawfully killed a patient on his first shift in Britain.
The challenge to begin changing the structure for vetting EU doctors before a long-planned Brussels review in 2012 could mean an early clash with EU partners for the new administration.
At present, EU doctors can join the British General Medical Council (GMC) register without undergoing the language and competence tests faced by other doctors from abroad, as long as their own countries' regulators vouch for their credentials.
The Department of Health in England has already ordered that the NHS implement properly its existing system for safeguarding patients following a series of Guardian revelations and a damning coroner's verdict on the case of 70-year-old David Gray, who was accidentally given a massive overdose of a painkilling drug by Ubani in 2008.
The GMC told the newspaper last August it could not guarantee the level of patient safety it wanted and in September, the Guardian reported how Ubani had failed in his first attempt to qualify for work in Britain and exploited the different ways local primary care trusts interpreted regulations on ensuring doctors were up to the job.
The current system, under which the GMC effectively says doctors are fit to practise and local primary care trusts (PCTs) ensure they are suitable for the individual job for which they are contracted directly or via private companies, has already been condemned in a government-commissioned review. But today's report by the health select committee wants more action.
Although Ubani's disastrous first shift was in Cambridgeshire, he won his ticket to work in Britain by persuading Cornwall and Isles of Scilly primary care trust to add him to its performers' list without language checks. No disciplinary action has been taken within the trust nor by the NHS against the trust.