It's a matter of trust

This is a word I keep coming back to.

For centuries, healthcare, and particularly medicine, has been held up on a community pedestal.  We have been highly regarded as an industry, and left to manage ourselves as we see fit.

For a time, this was probably reasonable.  Each individual was the master of their own development needs.  This essentially forms the basis of our existing CPD programs.

But there is increasing concern that when left to our own devices, we are falling behind.  I'm sure that for the vast majority, this isn't for the want of trying.  In fact, most clinicians take pride in their efforts to stay up to date and practice to the best level they can.

The public trust us to manage ourselves.  They expect that we can prove we've been trained to perform high risk tasks and procedures - in many cases, we can't.  They expect that we self monitor our outcome data - again, we can't.  They expect that we periodically refresh and validate we are still functioning at the lofty standards we set for ourselves.  Again, we can't.

Revalidation is a popular concept now among healthcare regulators around the world.  Healthcare error is also increasingly highlighted.  Evidence suggests that it takes more than a decade for published, high-grade research to become mainstream treatment.  These are canaries in the mine - we are not as prepared as we'd like to believe, but for now, we still have the confidence of the public.

At some point, this will change, and the public will demand more of us.  This is where the push for revalidation is coming from - a belief that as much as we pride ourselves in our ability to manager ourselves, we are not achieving the high standards expected of us by the community.  At some point, the community will push back.

In this presentation, I explore some of these concepts including trust

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOA4mmCK2O0