Professional Standards Authority

The Professional Standards Authority for Health and Social Care (PSA) oversees the organisations that regulate health and care professionals in the UK, including the General Optical Council.  

The PSA is an independent body, accountable to the UK Parliament. Each year the PSA carries out a performance review of us against their Standards of Good Regulation, which describe the outcomes they expect regulators to achieve in each of their core functions.

The PSA reports their findings to the UK Parliament, to health ministers in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, and to the public.

Read our 2020-21 Performance Review Report
Read our press release on the Report

Please note, the PSA is not a complaint handling body and they cannot investigate complaints about the regulators they oversee. If you wish to make a complaint about us, you should follow our own complaints process.

Fitness to Practise

The PSA also reviews the final fitness to practise decisions from our panel hearings. If they have concerns about an outcome of one of our hearings, they can refer our decision to court. However, the PSA cannot review decisions made earlier in our fitness to practise process, for example the decision not to refer a case to a hearing. Find out more about the PSA’s ability to review decisions.

For more information about their work, visit the PSA website.