Time for hard decisions on patient-centred professionalism.

Patients want doctors who are competent, respectful, honest and able to communicate with them. That is patient-centred professionalism. Professional self-regulation, as practised hitherto, has failed to achieve this for all patients. In the United Kingdom, a new way of looking at professional regulation has been developed--as a partnership between public and doctors. At its heart is a code of good practice, agreed between public and profession, in which doctors' licence to practise is conditional on regularly demonstrating continuing compliance. That means revalidation-relicensure.