Professional Standards Authority (PSA)

Doctors, nurses and other regulated health and care professionals are themselves regulated by bodies such as the GMC and NMC — but those regulators are, in turn, overseen by the Professional Standards Authority. The PSA's own website describes its role plainly: 'we oversee the work of UK health and social care regulators and accredited registers of healthcare practitioners. Our work improves regulation and protects the public.'

This oversight function includes scrutinising each regulator's performance annually and reviewing final fitness-to-practise decisions, with the power in some circumstances to refer decisions it considers too lenient to a court. The PSA also runs an accreditation scheme for voluntary registers of practitioners in fields that are not statutorily regulated, giving the public a way to check whether a practitioner working in an unregulated area (such as certain complementary therapies) is nonetheless subject to independently accredited standards.