Public Lecture: Is Health Regulation Promoting Trust And Transparency? Canterbury Christ Church University, UK

Main Category: Regulatory Affairs / Drug Approvals
Article Date: 08 Apr 2008 - 1:00 PDT

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The President of the Health Professions Council, Dr Anna van der Gaag, will ask whether health regulation promotes trust and transparency at a public lecture at Canterbury Christ Church University on Tuesday 15th April.

Dr van der Gaag will look at the role of the Health Professions Council, the UK standards watchdog which currently registers over 180,000 professionals from 13 health care professions. These include: art therapists; biomedical scientists, chiropodists, dieticians, occupational therapists, orthoptists, paramedics, physiotherapists and speech and language therapists.

Speaking before her lecture, Dr van der Gaag, said: "The Health Professions Council has been created to ensure that health professionals perform to the highest possible standard. Those who attend this lecture will learn that it provides a robust and transparent system, one that both the public and health professionals can trust, because it only registers professionals who meet its standards. It also fully regulates them to ensure they provide service users with the best possible care. I will explore the value of this in an era of ever increasing public accountability."

Dr van der Gaag's lecture is free to the public and forms part of Canterbury Christ Church University's spring public lecture series. No advance reservation is required. The lecture will take place at 6pm in the Old Sessions House Lecture Theatre, Longport, Canterbury.

Dr Anna van der Gaag

Dr Anna van der Gaag is an Independent Speech and Language Therapist and Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Community Based Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, University of Glasgow. She was formerly a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Speech and Language Therapy at the University of Strathclyde. She has been involved in work on quality improvement with allied health professionals over several decades, and has published widely within the health field.

She is President of the Health Professions Council, a member of the Council for Healthcare Regulatory Excellence, and is an Associated of the Royal Society of Medicine. She has served on government and non government advisory groups including the Department of Health, Kings Fund, Medical Research Council and the National Centre for Clinical Audit.

http://www.canterbury.ac.uk