Why we should Reject Mandatory MOPS

Abstract

Objective: To critically review General Council's decision designating participation in the MOPS program as mandatory for retention of Fellowship from 1 January 2003. Conclusions: Mandatory CME is increasingly being used overseas to pave the way for Managed Care. The RANZCP MOPS program, in both its compulsory audit and structured improvement components, explicitly and implicitly encourages Managed Care benchmarks, objectives and values. Managed Care inevitably leads to damage to the patient-therapist relationship and demoralisation of doctors. Mandatory MOPS is unproven, overly expensive, bureaucratic, unfair, intrusive and educationally counterproductive. It will give excessive control to the College over psychiatrists' practices and will lead to a number of legal problems. The decision of General Council should be reversed, the mandatory audit components of MOPS dropped and a more flexible, inexpensive and truly educationally based MOPS program developed. “If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family Anatidae on our hands.” Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency 1