FROM THE REGISTRAR’S DESK
Reflections and
Predictions
N
Rocco Gerace, MD
Registrar
Serving as the
Registrar of this
College for the past
15 years has been the
greatest professional
experience of my life
ow that I’ve hit the
home stretch of my
15-plus year tenure
as the College’s reg-
istrar, I’ve had some time to reflect
on all that we have accomplished,
and how much medical regulation
itself has changed. We’ve made
significant strides in improving pa-
tient safety and in seeing doctors as
part of a much broader health-care
system, and in starting to apply the
‘right touch’ regulation to the way
we think about and carry out the
work we do.
I also have no doubts that medical
regulation will go through just as
much – if not more – change in the
next 15 years. So with that in mind,
I’d like offer up my top five predic-
tions on how medical regulation will
evolve over the coming years.
1. Prospective regulation – includ-
ing periodic assessment – will
increasingly focus on education. I
think proactive - rather than reac-
tive - approaches to regulation will
become increasingly the norm. This
will be a growing expectation of
both government and the pub-
lic, and we will need to continue
evolving our programs to ensure
that we are a conduit to regular and
meaningful education for doctors.
There will always be an element of
regulation that involves disciplining
physicians who fall short of stan-
dards, but there will also be more
onus placed on promoting con-
tinuous quality improvement, and
determining how to effectively deal
with the impact that capacity and
age can have on a physician’s ability
to deliver effective care.
2. The public will increasingly de-
mand a credible source of informa-
tion about doctors. Patients want
information that will give them
a sense of the quality of care that
their doctors – or their prospective
doctors – provide to patients. For
that reason, we should anticipate
that the proliferation of user-gener-
ated websites like RateMD, is only
going to increase. But I believe that
medical regulatory authorities will
prevail as the most trusted source
of accurate information – thanks,
in very large part, to our ongoing
transparency efforts.
3. Data will play a much greater
role in assisting doctors with their
practice and ensuring safe care for
patients. The days of a one-size-fits-
all, cookie-cutter approach to qual-
ISSUE 4, 2017 DIALOGUE
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