Although debate lasted only about an hour, it was punctuated by frequent points of order as deputies struggled to stay on track.
The report is prepared annually by Health & Social Care’s responsible officer, Dr Peter Rabey, and provides a summary of activity relating to regulation and revalidation of doctors in 2025.
Although attached to the billet as an appendix report, Gavin St Pier and Chris Blin saw this as an opportunity for members to scrutinise health care in the island, and their successful amendment led to members returning to the States chamber yesterday for a short meeting. But during the debate those who took part had difficulty not allowing themselves to stray into areas that were not part of the report itself.
This led to HSC president George Oswald raising points of order as participants strayed too far.
‘There appears to be no point in going on with this debate,’ said an exasperated-sounding Deputy Gollop, after being on the receiving end of several challenges during his speech.
Deputy Oswald later agreed with Deputy Gollop’s view that the States chamber was not the best place for this report to be discussed, and it would make more sense to give members a presentation or workshop to enable them to know more about the issues.
Deputy St Pier also fell foul of points of order in his speech, during which he said that, once again, the report was ‘brief, formal, technocratic, rather dry and anodyne’.
He had used the same terms to describe the 2021 report, but debate on that had had a ‘long tail’ and led to four codes of conduct, one abuse of privilege complaint, a further complaint to HSC and two arrests.
His major issue this time was what was missing from the report – one of the two appendices which had included what he said was detail about the number of doctors who had seen new concerns raised about their practice.
The community and the States would benefit from this level of data, he said, and asked for HSC to consider having this reinstated in the next responsible officer report. All members in the chamber voted to note the report.
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