Understanding the future operating environment for professional regulation

The objective of the research is to inform the GMC's long-term strategic planning by modelling plausible trends and developments in our 'operating environment' as defined and discussed above. This is with the purpose of helping us to anticipate potential developments and to enable us to consider how we may need to respond, or act to take account of such developments, in order to remain relevant and effective. We briefly outline a suggested approach for a research project to achieve this objective in this section, which is a form of scenario planning. However we would welcome alternative approaches, provided these are accompanied by a clear rationale, which may better achieve our objective