Foreword

Trust is the most important aspect of health-care professionals’ relationship with individual patients, their carers, citizens, and society. If trust is lost, then the system of care breaks down.

Patients need to be confident that their doctor, nurse, physiotherapist, or other health-care worker is competent to deliver the health care they need. Families and carers need to be reassured that their loved ones are safe, and societies need to be confident that the people who staff their health-care delivery systems are committed to providing safe, up-to-date, and appropriate treatment.

In 1998, in an article in the BMJ, Sir Cyril Chantler said

This statement is even more true today than in the last century. Ensuring that every graduate, medical trainee, and senior clinician is and remains competent to deliver increasingly technical and sophisticated health care is the responsibility of all medical educators.

However, the role of regulators in guiding educators and trainers and holding them to account for the competence of their graduates and practicing clinicians is gaining increasing prominence.

Consequently, assessing and assuring the competence of current and future medical graduates is of interest to everyone from patients to educators, regulators, employers and policy makers. This publication on the role of quality assurance in ensuring safe and competent health care for all is both necessary and timely, particularly in a period of unprecedented challenge such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

I recommend this publication for those who are involved in reviewing or providing existing educational programs to ensure the competence of their graduates and trainees and as an essential road map for those setting up new programs.