Continuity and Change

On leaving the building yesterday lunchtime, I chanced on the Chair of the Panel. John W's opened the channel for a conversation and we sketched our different positions. He had previous experience as a panel member listening to child protection cases - his background is in social work. He has been a Chair at the HPC since the FTP hearings first began (2004). He assured me he was totally independent of the HPC and that occasionally there were even big rows. The kind of independence interests me. I had seen an advert for a panel chair in the last HPC Newsletter, they advertise, recruit, pay the fee, run the appraisals.

John was pleased that a member of the public was taking an interest in the work of the HPC - they should. Good. He said that everyone in the room is monitoring and scrutinising each other all the time, and that Angela H, today's HPC Legal Advisor, was really the one who made sure that justice was done. It was already very noticeable how the panel leans on the knowledge of this person, but so far I have mostly only heard them recite pre-formulated speeches about the balance of probabilities, their impartiality, and the panel's ultimate responsibilty for judgement. At the last hearing I attended I had been interested that the Legal Advisor loaned his laptop to the Panel to read their speech out from. What is of note is that the Panel Chair looks very much to that function to take his bearings in terms of justice, fairness, and due process - and to phraseology too. It has been very difficult so far for me to appreciate in what way the panel is independent, they seem very much tied up, and actually often they seem timid and sometimes even out of their depth.

In the room yesterday there was the Hearing Officer (Jonathan Dillon), the Legal Advisor (Angela H), the shorthand writer, the Presenting Officer (Elizabeth Tahari from the Kingsley Napley law practice), the Professional (Mr R) and his legal representative, the panel: Chair (J Williams), the lay member (Lesley Hawksworth) and the Speech and Language Therapist member (Martin Duckworth). In the audience: me and another case manager (understudying the role which was today filled by the tenacious and determined Elizabeth Tahari), and, when the witness (Ms Betts) took the stand, a man who might have been her father sat for a while with us.

There are many accounts of the HPC - what it is, why its there, what it does. Marc Seale, Chief Executive, stresses its independence and innovative nature. John Williams, Panel Chair, stresses its similarity to the other current regulatory bodies (especially the GMC), and its place in the sequence of history (taking over both the building and the work of a previous incumbant: the Council for Professions Supplementary to Medicine). The case manager at the back of the room is more familiar with registration hearings - something that I can only guess at by overhearing conversations in the reception (people from Australia and Italy who want to register for work in the UK). Yesterday's registrant at the hearing (Mr R) knows that it has the power to wreck his livlihood and seriously disrupt his life for a year or so before. For his patient and the parents of his patient and others like them? I wonder whether they feel protected from an incompetent or miscreant professional by the actions of the Council. It seems rather unlikely, on the balance of all probabilities.