There’s been yet another story about fake qualifications in the news. A woman from New Zealand spent a couple of decades working as a consultant psychiatrist in our National Health Service (NHS) before it was discovered that she had made up her medical degree and forged a bogus letter of recommendation from Pakistan. The deception only came to light after she had been convicted of trying to defraud an elderly patient.
Fake doctors seem to be something of an issue, but as I am English I am far more concerned about the epidemic of deceptive dentists across our green and pleasant land. When I read that a "bogus dentist with no qualifications managed to fool her employers at NHS hospitals for nine years before being discovered” it makes me shiver. When I see a woman convicted at Birmingham Magistrates' Court on two charges of carrying out dentistry work without holding any dentistry qualifications, I get twitchy. When I find out that Manchester Magistrates Court convicted a man who had no dentist qualifications, used a false name and was fraudulently using the registration number of a genuine dentist, I begin to think about leaving the country for good.
When I discover that a bogus dentist (an asylum seeker who told immigration officers he had a dental practice in Iran) took a dead dentist's identity, drilled without a local anaesthetic and did expensive fillings that crumbled within days, I have trouble sleeping.
(I can’t help but think of late the late lamented Robert Schimmel’s joke about visiting the dentist: “Do you want a shot of novocaine / No, I want a shot of you getting a diploma”.)
How can this happen, you might wonder, in a world where the blockchain exists?
Suppose there was some global educational qualifications blockchain. That wouldn’t by itself fix anything. I bung a clerk at the University of Wherever to add my Ph.D in Quantum Philosophy to said blockchain. I now have immutable proof of my leading-edge expertise that is far more convincing than some piece of paper.
So. How exactly might the blockchain help?
I happened to look at a couple of projects in this space earlier in the year, and I can tell you that much of the wishful thinking projected onto the blockchain is really nothing about consensus or immutability but, as in some many cases, all about interoperability. There is no global standard for education qualifications, there is no global trust framework for organisations able to create qualifications (and there regulators) and there is no global infrastructure for digital signatures in that framework. All of these problems have to be solved before we get near to figuring out whether a global blockchain might or might not be a better place to store such qualifications that either a global database of qualifications or a scheme for federating qualification repositories.
Let’s begin by recapitulating the elements of the problem space. If I show up at the local practice in response to their dentist wanted ad on indeed.com there are three domains to consider. In the authorisation domain, I must present the appropriate qualification and the practice must be able to validate it. Of course, I must be able to demonstrate in the authentication domain that the qualification belongs to me. And although it is not at all necessary for the regular functioning of the practice, the identification domain must provide my “real” identity because of the rules of the medical world.
Let’s walk through these steps.
First, presenting the qualification.
Second, authenticating the qualification.
Third, linking the qualification to identity.
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