Health and Personal Social Services (Northern Ireland) Order 1978

Requirement of suitable experience N.I.

8.—(1) Where the Department so prescribes, a Health and Social Services Board shall not arrange under Article 56 of the principal Order with medical practitioner for him to provide general medical services for persons in its area unless he is suitably experienced.

(2) For the purposes of this Part a medical practitioner is “suitably experienced”, if he either—

(a) has acquired the prescribed medical experience, or

(b) is by virtue of regulations made under this Article exempt from the need to have acquired that experience.

(3) For the purposes of this Article regulations may provide—

(a) for prescribing the medical experience needed to satisfy paragraph (2)( a);

(b) as to the documents which a medical practitioner may or must produce as evidence that he is suitably experienced or has acquired medical experience of any particular kind;

(c) for requiring a medical practitioner who claims to have acquired the prescribed experience to submit particulars of his experience to a prescribed body, and for requiring that body, if satisfied that he has acquired the prescribed experience, to issue him a certificate (a “certificate of prescribed experience”) to that effect;

(d) for enabling a medical practitioner without the prescribed experience who considers that the medical experience which he has acquired is, or ought to be regarded as, equivalent to the prescribed experience, to submit particulars of that experience to a prescribed body, and for requiring or enabling that body, if satisfied that the medical experience acquired is so equivalent, to issue to him a certificate (a “certificate of equivalent experience”) to that effect;

(e) for treating a medical practitioner who holds a certificate of equivalent experience as satisfying paragraph (2)( a);

(f) as to the circumstances or the conditions in or subject to which a medical practitioner is exempt from the need to have acquired the prescribed experience;

(g) for conferring on a medical practitioner who is refused a certificate of prescribed experience or a certificate of equivalent experience a right of appeal to a body constituted by the Department and for any matter for which it appears to the Department to be requisite or expedient to provide in consequence of the conferring of that right;

(h) for anything authorised or required by this Article to be prescribed or otherwise provided for by regulations.

(4) Regulations under this Article shall be framed so as to allow the prescribed experience to be acquired without undertaking full-time employment.

(5) Before making any regulations under this Article the Department shall consult such organisations as appear to the Department to be representative of the medical profession.

(6) Regulations under this Article shall be subject to negative resolution.

(7) In this Article—

• “medical experience” includes hospital experience in any specialty, and

• “the prescribed medical experience” means the medical experience for the time being prescribed for the purposes of paragraph (2)( a).