OHPA :: Office of the Health Professions Adjudicator

Closure date announced

tbunting — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 10:48:35 +0000

Following passage of the Health and Social Care Act 2012, OHPA will be formally abolished on 30 June 2012. As a result, copies of our 2011-12 annual report and accounts and 2012-13 closure accounts will not be posted on this site but can be accessed, once published, at http://www.official-documents.gov.uk.

Any queries regarding OHPA following abolition should be addressed to the Department of Health.

OHPA Annual Report 2010-2011 published

tbunting — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 14:50:35 +0000

OHPA has published its Annual Report for 2010-2011. You can download the report by clicking here.

Hard copies of the Report are also available on request.

A Welsh version of the Report is available here.

OHPA’s 2011-12 Annual Report and Accounts and our closedown accounts will not be published on this site. They will be available at http://www.official-documents.gov.uk when published subsequent to OHPA’s abolition on 30 June 2012.

OHPA response to GMC consultation

tbunting — Wed, 25 May 2011 08:43:41 +0000

OHPA has responded to the GMC consultation paper, Reform of the fitness to practise procedures at the GMC: The future of adjudication and the establishment of the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service. While welcoming many of the proposals – which owe much to OHPA’s own work on these matters – OHPA suggests that the governance arrangements for the new MPDS may need re-visiting and offers views on other aspects of the GMC’s plans.

A copy of the OHPA response is available here.

Three new papers published

tbunting — Mon, 09 May 2011 11:11:56 +0000

OHPA has published three papers drafted by our Policy Director, Wendy Harris, that set out what was OHPA’s initial thinking on Fitness to Practise (FtP) adjudications and the research on which it was based. The papers have been prepared by Mrs Harris while seconded by OHPA to the Council for Healthcare Regulatory Excellence (CHRE), and are intended to assist those regulators and others who are thinking about the future shape of FtP in light of the Government’s decision not to proceed with the OHPA programme.

The papers consider the style and format of adjudication, the impact of possible changes to adjudication on initial FtP processes, and the views canvassed on these matters from those working across health professional regulation. They can be accessed here, here, and here.

Please let us know (at info@ohpa.org.uk) if you have found these papers helpful or have ideas about other material we could make available.

OHPA responses to GMC and GOC consultations

tbunting — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 10:25:39 +0000

The OHPA Board has responded to recent consultation exercises by the General Medical Council and the General Optical Council in which the regulators foreshadow changes to Fitness to Practise arrangements that reflect learning from the OHPA programme.

You can read OHPA’s response to the consultation on reform of FtP practises at the GMC here.

You can read OHPA’s response to the consultation on amendments to the GOC’s FtP rules here.

The ‘Adopt and Adapt’ approach to GMC adjudications: paper published

tbunting — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 10:19:11 +0000

OHPA’s medium term objective was to introduce wide-ranging reforms to the adjudicatory process – as adumbrated in the Ambitions Paper already published on this website. Its proposals in the short term were more modest: to ‘adopt and adapt’ the existing GMC system to cause minimum disruption and allow proper time for consultation on OHPA’s package of reforms.

A paper setting out the important ‘adaptations’ of the GMC rules is available here.

Ambitions paper published

tbunting — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 14:15:52 +0000

OHPA has published a paper setting out what would have been its longer-term ambitions for Fitness to Practise adjudications. The paper is being made available now as part of OHPA’s wider endeavour to maximise the learning from its work and activities. It is hoped that the paper will be especially helpful to those regulators considering how to modernise their own procedures.

You can access the paper here.

Amongst the ambitions were a President to lead OHPA’s tribunal members, much more effective case management, and full use of a costs jurisdiction. OHPA intended to retain both a London and Manchester base for adjudications, but hoped to look at a range of locations once economies of scale allowed. Where possible, panellists would have been locally recruited, and hearings might sometimes have taken place outside of normal working hours.

Benchmarking research published

tbunting — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 12:06:05 +0000

OHPA has published two documents setting out the findings from its research into the attitude of health professionals towards independent Fitness to Practise adjudication.

The Executive Summary of the benchmarking research (Quadrant and ICM Research for the Office of the Health Professions Adjudicator (OHPA), Final Report on Baseline Findings and Stakeholder Views, September 2010) is available in one downloadable file here. OHPA can also make available the full research report on request (please email us at info@ohpa.org.uk). However, please note that the full report is a PowerPoint document of 1.5MB, so you should first check the permissions on your mailbox to ensure you can receive a file of this size.

OHPA’s Policy Director, Wendy Harris, has published an article based on the research. Entitled ‘Time to overturn the regulatory capture?’; the article is available here.

OHPA response to consultation on the future of fitness to practise adjudication for health professionals

admin — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 12:16:25 +0000

The Department of Health consultation on the future of fitness to practise adjudication for health professionals was launched on 9 August.

http://www.dh.gov.uk/en/Consultations/Liveconsultations/DH_118460

You can see our response here.

OHPA Report and Accounts for 25 January to 31 March 2010 published

tbunting — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 11:59:26 +0000

This is the first annual report and accounts published by OHPA. The reporting period covers the time between OHPA becoming an independent legal entity to the close of the last financial year. The report and accounts can be found here.

A Welsh version of the report and accounts can be found here.