Protecting the public from unregistered practitioners

Protecting the public from unregistered practitioners

Health professional regulators have a duty to ensure protection for patients and the public. Tackling title misuse is an important part of this work. Protecting professional titles ensures that patients and the public can be confident in their health professionals and can reduce risk to patients from unregistered and unqualified practitioners.

In this project, we have considered the risk to public protection presented by those who pass themselves off as registered professionals. We began with a narrow question about the difficulties in title misuse prosecution. However, based on our work, we have gone beyond that with a focus on the risk to patient and public safety arising from to title misuse.

We have produced our final report.

We consulted the nine health professional regulators and other organisations. We have found that it is difficult to know how many people are passing themselves off as registered professionals.

We recognise there are barriers to tackling title misuse. However, we believe that regulators should be proactive in tackling title misuse and wider issues of unregistered practice. Therefore, we have made the following recommendations:

• Regulators should work to increase public awareness about the importance of health professional registration and regulation
   
• The regulators should foster relationships with organisations that have a shared interest in preventing title misuse, including other regulators, Trading Standards authorities, and directory listing organisations
   
• Where regulators have identified an issue exists with a public listing, such as telephone and web-based directories, they should undertake a periodic audit to ensure individuals listed under a protected title are registered and those that are not will be removed from the listing
   
• All the regulators should send ‘cease and desist’ letters to those who misuse a title, as a first step in tackling title misuse.