Infection Control (Hansard, 20 November 2003)

§ Mr. Hutton

For nurses, midwives and other non-medical health professionals, it is for local employers to determine their training needs linked to local service plans. Access to training is affected by whether funding is available, staff can be released, training interventions 1385W are appropriate, flexible and convenient and mentors/assessors are available. It would not be practical for the centre to be prescriptive on this.

Acute trusts have to provide education on infection control as part of the controls assurance standard. Recently published guidance from the National Institute for Clinical Excellence on infection control in primary and community care includes recommendations on training.

For doctors, the content and standard of postgraduate medical training is the responsibility of the United Kingdom competent authorities, the specialist training authority for specialist medicine and, for general practice, the joint committee on postgraduate training for general practice, which will both be replaced by the postgraduate medical education and training board. Their role is that of custodians of quality standards in postgraduate medical education and practice. They are independent of the Department. In addition, the General Medical Council's education committee has the general function of promoting high standards of medical education and co-ordinating all stages of medical education to ensure that students and newly qualified doctors are equipped with the knowledge, skills and attitudes essential for professional practice.

All of these bodies have a vested interest in ensuring that doctors are equipped to deal with the issues they will encounter in practice—including where appropriate, those relating to infection control. However, it is neither practicable nor desirable for the Government to prescribe and monitor the exact training that any individual doctor will receive.