On 12 May at its Sarajevo meting, FEDCAR adopted recommendations (in French and in English versions) regarding the use by its members of the Alert Mechanism. Since the 18 January 2016, more than 11.000 alerts of professional sanctions applied to health professionals and some other professionals have been issued all over the EU. Among which 6.212 concerned nurses and 2.509 concerned doctors. Regarding dental practitioners, the British GDC has issued 419 alerts and has received 87 alerts from 9 countries (21 from Denmark) : a total of more than 500 alerts of professional sanctions would have been sent in one year and a half about dentists (available figures in May 2017). 2 remarks have nonetheless to be done.

ON THE FIGURES The numbers are not 100% accurate given that :
  • all EU countries have not implemented this mechanism yet
  • users have triggered erroneous alerts, according to the EU Commission’s I.T. services
  • some users trigger the mechanism for the same professional sanction at different stages of its evolution
ON THE USE During a 16 May ‘worshop’ that the EU Commission has organised in Brussels to mark the first year of operation of this mechanism, the EU Officials from DG Growth have been addressed requests and suggestions on its improvement, in particular :
  • on some aspects of the automatic translations
  • on the appearance of the alert (to learn prima facie about the profession, the specialties at case, and the sanction’s reasons)
  • on the triggering of the alert mechanism at the different stages of the evolution of a same professional sanction
The Commission has indicated it will not address all the remarks but it will for sure undertake some updating and -as much as technically possible- some improvement from this summer onwards :
  • the Commission has already stated it will draft a user’s guide, i.a. on the request for further information that a hosting Competent Authority may ask to a home Competent Authority (this has been a repeated request from FEDCAR).