Managing the burden of Continuous Screening
In all regulated industries and professions, it is essential to ensure that employees are appropriately licensed and qualified for their roles.
The process maintains confidence in the profession, protects the reputation of the employer and offers quality assurance to the customer, user or patient. Compliance removes much of the risk of litigation and guarantees a regulated standard of service.
In the UK, a regulated profession is an occupation in which professionals must have certain qualifications or experience in order to perform certain activities or use a protected title, as stated in the Professional Qualifications Act 2022.
Regulators are the persons or bodies charged with ensuring that individuals have the appropriate qualifications to undertake the duties of their profession. They must also make sure that a regime of regular screening is established to ensure that employees continue to be licensed to practice in their field. Individuals may have their licenses withdrawn or endorsed for a number of reasons, from malpractice to simply not maintaining currency of qualification, and may choose not to inform their employers.
In some cases, regulatory functions may be performed by a single regulator, while in other cases, they can be distributed across different regulators or regulating authorities.
Continuous Screening in Healthcare
The UK’s Nursing and Midwifery Council has maintained a register of nurses, midwives and nursing associates licensed to practice in the UK for more than a hundred years. It provides accurate information on its members’ qualifications to hospitals, general practice, nursing and care homes and other clinical environments.
In the UK, medical qualifications are required to be re-checked every 30 days to ensure well-regulated and qualified care. To achieve this, large employers such as NHS hospital trusts may use an automated medical license monitoring service that regularly rechecks a database of medical staff against the appropriate regulating authorities’ databases as an annual subscription service.
Where hospital trusts employ up to 20,000 staff, or where there is a regular turnover of staff, the administrative overhead of maintaining accurate lists is significant, and regular screening is frequently subcontracted to background screening services.
Continuous screening in other sectors
Similar technology is used to routinely check qualifications within professions including law, engineering, teaching, transport and social work.
For further information on Continuous License Monitoring, contact Phil Dupont at Qualification Check on [email protected]
