"Do you want a shot of novocain? / No, I want a shot of you getting a diploma."

There’s been yet another story about fake medical 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.

Now, I rather imagine that if I were a hospital or a medical centre or a GP practice employing a new doctor, I might be tempted to at least look them up on LinkedIn or something before I let them get their hands on a patient but I suppose that under the NHS it’s considered ungentlemanly or discriminatory or just plain rude to ask a prospective clinical employee for verifiable evidence of any valid qualifications. We are English, so we take people at their word. Unfortunately, dictum meum pactum. May not survive the 

While fake doctors seem to be something of an issue, as I have written before, I am English and therefore 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.

(Which again reminds me of the late lamented Robert Schimmel’s joke about visiting the dentist: “Do you want a shot of novocain? / No, I want a shot of you getting a diploma.”)

How can this happen, you might wonder, in a world where the blockchain exists? As Don and Alex Tapscott remind us in “Blockchain Revolution”, the "blockchain can hold any legal document, from deeds and marriage licenses to educational degrees and birth certificates”. And indeed managing educational qualifications seems to be one of those things I hear about at conferences where the magical properties of the blockchain are going to transform the sector and bring about a new era of peace and prosperity.

But how?

Suppose there was some global educational qualifications blockchain. That wouldn’t by itself fix anything as far as I can see. How exactly would the blockchain stop fake dentists from fixing my teeth with superglue and polyfilla?

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 so many other cases, really all about interoperability. There is no global standard for education qualifications, there is no global trust framework for organisations able to create qualifications (and their regulators) and there is no global infrastructure for digital signatures in that framework.

Think about it. If you present me with a Ph.D in Quantum Philosophy from the University of Woking, I need to be able to establish a trust chain that tells that there is a WokingU, that WokingU was authorised to award Ph.Ds at the time that you’re Ph.D was awarded, that the Ph.D you are presenting is real and signed by WokingU and that you are indeed the subject of the Ph.D award.

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.