What is the purpose of regulating doctors? First and foremost, it is to build confidence and trust between the public and professionals. If this relationship is damaged, the entire health system on which high quality care is based will become unstable and patients will suffer. By this standard, Steve Field's report on inspections of general practitioners' (GPs) surgeries has contributed to instability, not trust. The Care Quality Commission (CQC) inspected 910 GP practices, overwhelmingly targeting those about which concerns had already been voiced. Clearly, seeking out surgeries that are already under suspicion will not give a representative sample. Yet the media wasted no time in proclaiming that "1 in 3 family doctors failing checks" (The i) and that "Inspection finds third of GP practices fail at least one of required standards" (The Guardian). Such sloppy interpretation is at best innocently misleading.
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