herbal medicine practitioners are to be regulated
The College of Medicine today welcomed the announcement of statutory regulation for herbal practitioners.
The College of Medicine believes that statutory regulation is vital if UK herbal practitioners are to continue to practise and prescribe in compliance with new EU regulations.
This decision will ensure good practice and the provision of safe products for the thousands of patients who visit herbal practitioners every year.
The register will be administered by the Health Professions Council, the independent statutory body that ensures practitioners meet proper standards of qualifications, training, professional skills and conduct.
The move to statutory regulation of this sector is in line with the College’s aim to develop safe and evidence-based patient choice. Without statutory regulation, the use of traditional Chinese medicine, Ayurveda or other types of herbal medicine could have been effectively outlawed once the new EU Traditional Herbal Directive comes into force.
"The Government has put the safety and interests of patients first. This is essential if the UK is to provide safe and evidence-based healthcare choices.” said College of Medicine Chairman, Dr Michael Dixon [1].
Professor George Lewith, College of Medicine Vice Chair and Professor of Health Research at Southampton University, said: "Evidence for the efficacy of herbal medicines is growing; they may offer cheap, safe and effective approaches for many common complaints. The College of Medicine values this pluralistic approach to care".
Kaye McIntosh, College of Medicine Vice Chair and Acting Chair of its Patients’ Council, said: “Without statutory regulation many herbal practitioners in the UK would have been unable to continue practising and thousands of patients would be unable to make the choice to use herbal treatments. Statutory regulation of this sector is clearly the best way to ensure the safe provision of herbal practice.”
Today’s announcement is a result of Government research and public consultation [2] over the last decade.
“This announcement has been a long time coming, so it is now essential that the HPC moves forward as fast as possible with statutory regulation. The College would like to see swift, thoughtful and robust regulation that protects the public from adulterated products, encourages the safe practice of herbal medicine and enables the development of the profession.” said Professor Lewith.
The College of Medicine is an alliance of doctors, nurses, health professionals, patients and scientists. It is committed to patient centred medicine; and to improving the health, wellbeing and care of individual patients and local populations.
The College is unique in:
•Bringing together all professional groups including doctors, nurses and allied professionals as equal partners in care.
•Bringing together scientific evidence, professional opinion and patient perspective as equal partners in any therapeutic decision.
•Bringing a new and innovative perspective on health and care that includes the wider determinants of health and combines conventional, complementary and sustainable lifestyle approaches to healing.
[1] Dr Michael Dixon is chair of the NHS Alliance, and is Visiting Professor at the University of Westminster; Honorary Senior Fellow in Public Policy at the Health Services Management Centre, University of Birmingham; and Honorary Senior Lecturer in Integrated Health at the Peninsula Medical School. He is also a Senior Associate at the King’s Fund where he is a member of the Steering Group of the Inquiry into quality of GP care.
[2] Statutory regulation of herbal practitioners has had the backing of a report from the House of Lords’ Science and Technology Committee and two independently chaired Department of Health working parties under Professor Michael Portillo. Following the publication of the last report in 2008, the Government ran a public consultation that elicited over 6,000 responses, the majority of which favoured this Government initiative.
Article written and supplied by PRdemystified
Last Reviewed: 10 March 2011
Next Review Date: 18 February 2013
Shortly after the government announced that, herbal medicine practitioners were to be regulated and that it would be a statutory requirement, a spokesperson from talkhealth Partnership Ltd spoke with Professor George Lewith, College of Medicine Vice Chair and Professor of Health Research at Southampton University. Our spokesperson asked Professor Lewith what he thought the likely impact would be on all herbal practitioners, Professor Lewith believes the impact on practitioners “would bring them into the paramedical fold and undoubtedly improve the quality of their qualification and the standards of what they offer. This will no doubt come with a bureaucratic cost but I think it’s a legitimisation of herbal practice and they’ve been knocking on the door and improving the quality of their education for the last 100 years.” When asked what, if any, would the bureaucratic implications have on herbal practitioners, especially the small businesses, as far as finances, paperwork and qualifications were concerned, Professor Lewith said “I think it will mean that as they become medically registered they won’t need to charge VAT so that might help a bit, undoubtedly there will be more paperwork involved for them because they will need to have appraisals and all the bureaucracy that goes with regulation which will increase the fees to their registering body. At the moment I don’t think they will need to increase their level of qualification as over the last 10 years they’ve effectively changed from private schools to university-based qualifications and there’s been a huge cycle of improvement. I have no doubt that more will do Masters and PhDs and I’m quite certain that their clinical qualifications will improve through the natural cycle of continually improving academic excellence.” Professor Lewith was unable to confirm what the timeframe would be for practitioners to put these guidelines into place, this he felt would be better answered by legislators, however he said “I suspect there will need to be interim legislation to cover herbal practitioners who are in the process of getting registered so that the EU directive won’t be punitive.“ talkhealth were interested to know whether the regulations would have the capacity to weed out the good from the bad. Professor Lewith said “weeding the good from the bad never obviously happens with statutory regulation, it often depends what you mean by good and bad but from our experience with the GMC one would suggest that these regulatory bodies are not always effective at weeding out good and bad practitioners in all fields of clinical medicine.” Lastly we asked Professor Lewith about the cost implications this would have on practitioners – “I think the majority of herbal practitioners will remain in private practice so there won’t be a cost implication in that context for the NHS but there may well be a cost implication for them and their registering body but as I’ve said, VAT may be saved.” talkhealth Partnership Ltd wish to thank Professor Lewith for taking the time to provide them with a comment. |
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