According to reports in British newspapers, doctors are to be tested every year to ensure they are fit to practise their profession.

At present, doctors can go for their entire career without any formal assessment of their competency. But from December this year they will be assessed to see if they are fit to stay on the medical register, the General Medical Council said.

The test would take the form of an annual appraisal and a more comprehensive meeting every five years. Doctors will be expected to demonstrate they meet clinical standards and have kept up to speed with the latest developments.

Appraisals will include feedback from patients and colleagues.

Niall Dickson, chief executive of the GMC, said: “From the end of this year we will begin to tell each doctor the date when he or she will be expected to revalidate.”

When one thinks about it, this is rather unsurprising. After all, we subject our cars to a VRT test once every two years. And doctors are even more crucial than cars.

The fact it is being introduced in Britain, the mother country of medicine, so to speak, should make us sit up and listen.

For the British doctors to have accepted this kind of testing every five years instead of retreating behind all kinds of haughty raising of barriers speaks volumes.

Had someone here come up with this idea, he would have been laughed out of clinic. Instead, this is what is being done in that most advanced of countries.

One can understand that to single out doctors for regular appraisals might seem discriminatory. Why not appraisals for lawyers, for engineers, for journalists even? There is some sense in such questions but then none of the above-mentioned professions have so much vital importance for the life of each one of us as doctors have.

Doctors may argue they do attend refresher courses. But that is all the more reason why they should not be afraid of a periodic validation. We are speaking of proper refresher courses not events hosted by medicine importers to launch this or that product, of which each doctor gets tons of invitations per year.

Science, and medicine are all the time making great progress with multiple inventions happening on a daily basis. Many doctors, like fellow professionals, are too taken up in their work to be able to keep up to date with the developments that are taking place.

More, certain inventions and developments are a paradigm shift: To understand them requires an understanding of an entire new branch of science or of medicine. Hence the need for doctors to keep up to date with developments in medicine on a more comprehensive level than the sporadic flicking of medical journals.

Furthermore, the small snippet we have quoted also tells us there is a good relationship between the medical authorities and the General Medical Council, a relationship that is proactive and not at all raising of barricades or acting defensive.

We have all passed through, in this country, times when the authorities and the doctors were at complete loggerheads, when the authorities unwisely launched a battle against the doctors. We all know the consequences of that battle: How Maltese patients were left without proper care and how doctors were brought over from countries in the east who did not know the basic English language, when Maltese doctors had to find jobs elsewhere and migrate with their (mostly young) families.

This is not something to be imposed, but rather a suggestion that must be made and served with assurances it is fair and just. But if the British will be doing it, then why ever we in Malta say we don’t need it?