Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment he has made of the adequacy of the availability of sufficiently qualified assessors to review portfolios under the Portfolio Pathway system.

No assessment has been made by the Department of the effectiveness of the Portfolio Pathway route to professional registration for overseas qualified specialist medical practitioners and general practitioners or the availability of portfolio assessors. The Department does not hold application or qualification data about this route.

The General Medical Council (GMC) is the independent regulator of medical practitioners, or doctors, in the United Kingdom. It is responsible for setting standards that must be met by both domestic and international applicants wishing to be added to their registers to ensure registrants are safe to practise.

As the independent regulator, it is for the GMC to monitor the operational effectiveness of its routes to registration, and to determine the qualifications and experience that it will accept. The GMC publishes data on applications to its Portfolio Pathway at the following link:

https://www.gmc-uk.org/about/what-we-do-and-why/data-and-research/statistics-and-reports/doctors-specialist-applications-and-certificates