A recently announced proposal to reform regulation across all healthcare professions has been criticised for its failure to provide a specific timeline for General Dental Council (GDC) reform.
The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) announced plans for reform of regulators across all healthcare professions on 11 December.
Initial proposals involve the General Medical Council (GMC), Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) and the Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC).
Proposed changes include:
- A faster registration process for both new healthcare workers and those returning to work
- Standardised processes for consistency across regulators
- Less adversarial and more proportionate fitness to practise processes.
The government also announced the decision to bring physician and anaesthesia associates under GMC regulation as the first step towards reform.
Through these updates, the government aims to expand the NHS workforce, improve collaboration across the healthcare sector and make processes faster and fairer for both registrants and the public.
‘No commitment made’
The DHSC stated that this first stage will form the blueprint for reform of all healthcare regulators, including the GDC for dentistry. However, no timeline for applying these changes to dentistry has been specified.
Raj Rattan, dental director at Dental Protection, said: ‘The government said it will in the first instance focus on reforms to the GMC, NMC and HCPC, with no commitment made to when GDC reform will progress.
‘Our hope was that in this update the government would publish a more specific timetable for GDC reform. However there is no further detail, which is disappointing.
‘We will continue to push the government to publish a specific timetable for GDC reform and provide dental professionals with some certainty on when they may finally be able to benefit from reform to their regulator.’
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