Regulating the Profession

In one line

A court can order a doctor to pay; only the regulator can stop them practising.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: the medical profession in India is regulated by the National Medical Commission Act 2019, which replaced the earlier council-based structure with a Commission and four Autonomous Boards, maintains the National Register of licensed practitioners, makes registration the condition of lawful practice through the bar to practice, and vests the regulation of professional conduct and medical ethics in the Ethics and Medical Registration Board, which exercises appellate jurisdiction over the actions of State Medical Councils.

Why the law has this at all

The court remedies in the preceding chapters share a limitation: they operate after an injury, at the suit of the person injured, and they produce money. None of them addresses the practitioner who is unfit to practise, and none of them protects the next patient.

Professional regulation answers three problems the ordinary law cannot.

Entry. Somebody must decide who may hold themselves out as a doctor, and the criterion has to be qualification rather than the market's willingness to pay.

Continuing fitness. A practitioner may become unfit through conduct, incapacity or dishonesty without any patient having yet been harmed, and a system that waited for harm would be waiting for the very thing it exists to prevent.

Standards. The negligence standard in [Medical Negligence: the Civil Action] is defined by reference to what a responsible body of practitioners accepts as proper. Somebody has to state what that is, and the profession's own code is where it is stated.

That last point is the connection between this chapter and the rest of the module: professional regulation does not merely run alongside the law of negligence, it supplies the content of the standard the law applies.

The structure of the 2019 Act

Section 3 constitutes the National Medical Commission, and section 4 provides for its composition. Section 10 sets out its powers and functions.

Section 16 constitutes four Autonomous Boards, and the division of labour between them is the thing to learn:

Section 11 constitutes the Medical Advisory Council, whose functions are in section 12.

Sections 14 and 15 provide for the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test and the National Exit Test, which are the entry gates to and from medical education.

Section 28 requires the prior permission of the Medical Assessment and Rating Board before any person establishes a new medical college, starts a postgraduate course or increases the number of seats, and section 29 sets the criteria for approving or disapproving a scheme.