Children are being forced to wait for months for consultations and treatment because of delays caused by the Home Office’s new “Vetting and Barring Scheme” for those working with children, according to the Royal College of Surgeons.
The RCS is therefore calling for the introduction of a “passport” system for doctors crossing NHS Trusts. To ensure patients get equitable access to treatment across the country, specialist doctors frequently need to undertake short-notice cover of colleagues in other hospitals who take annual leave or sickness absence. Also, surgeons need to work across Trusts in the course of service delivery and training. The new regulations mean that paediatric surgeons need to undergo a Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) check every time they work at a new hospital and are not allowed to start work until the process is completed and hard copy received by post by the employing Trust. Currently, backlogs in the system mean this can take several months, which is far too long for NHS Trusts to be able to effectively cover each other should highly specialist doctors become suddenly unavailable. The Royal College of Surgeons believes that the solution is a system of mutual recognition, so that a doctor who has undergone the CRB process with one NHS Trust is automatically cleared to undertake locum cover in another if required. This suggestion has now been put to the Department of Health. Richard Collins, vice president of the Royal College of Surgeons, commented: “It is absolutely right that there should be robust checks for anyone who works with children, but there needs to be some common sense to ensure patients don’t suffer. The NHS needs flexibility to enable surgeons in specialist fields to undertake operating lists in other Trusts, often on an ad hoc basis. To require them to repeat the same time-consuming bureaucratic process each time is a completely unnecessary delay that must be revised.”
