Revalidation, for so long a dot on the horizon, is now approaching at great speed and will start to make a real impact on our professional lives in the very near future.

In the autumn of 2009 the GMC will introduce the licence to practise. It will be the licence, rather than registration, that signifies that a doctor has the legal status to practise medicine. All doctors holding a licence to practise will need to participate in revalidation.

Revalidation will require cardiologists to demonstrate to the GMC every five years that they practise according to standards set by the GMC/Royal College. This will be mainly through an enhanced form of annual appraisal. Cardiologists will need to collect evidence about their practise to support their future revalidation, participate in annual appraisal in the workplace, and take part in multisource feedback.

These changes represent a formidable logistical challenge and BCS believes strongly that professional input is essential to make the process work. We want a high quality system that protects patients, is fair to all the different subspecialities of cardiology, uses high quality data and is easy to use. The more we are involved in designing the systems, the better they will be for both patients and doctors.

To this end BCS has been working hard with the GMC, RCP and ESC from an early stage. We feel our plans are more developed than most specialities and we hope that we can influence the overall shape of the revalidation process. The backbone of our approach has been to emphasise the need for appropriate balance in the assessment of the key areas of knowledge, skills and professionalism. We feel that the best interests of the public are served by a continuous knowledge assurance process as opposed to a periodic knowledge assessment.