The General Dental Council (GDC) failed to meet standards for timeliness in both fitness to practise cases and registration processing.
This comes after the Professional Standards Authority (PSA) published its 2022/23 GDC performance review. The review monitored the GDC’s performance against the Standards of Good Regulation.
Out of the 18 Standards, the GDC met 16 of them. This means the PSA is not satisfied that the regulator is performing well in two areas.
The GDC failed to meet the standard for registration due to the time it takes the regulator to process applications. The PSA noted that some of the factors towards this are ‘outside the GDC’S direct control’, and therefore the regulator has put measures in place to improve its performance which the PSA will monitor.
In addition, the standard for timeliness in fitness to practise was not met by the GDC because it is ‘taking too long to deal with cases’. As a result, the PSA will also monitor the GDC’s efforts to improve in this area.
‘Disappointing’ outcome
Following the review, the GDC has said that changes to legislation to register dental professionals resulted in a ‘surge’ of applications. As a result, the regulator recruited a large team to help process applications.
The GDC said the backlog is now beginning to decrease, and that it is on track to register ‘more new dental professionals this year than ever before’ due to the increased workload.
Regarding the fitness to practise timeliness, the GDC acknowledged that this has been an ongoing issue. Therefore, the regulator has expanded its casework team and streamlined processes, among other measures, to reduce delays.
In addition, the GDC hopes that improved timeliness of fitness to practise cases will help to reduce the impact to the mental health of the individuals involved.
Gurvinder Soomal is the GDC’s interim chief executive officer and registrar. He said: ‘We are making very real improvements to the fitness to practise process.
‘It is disappointing that the effects are not yet visible in the performance data, although this is an inevitable consequence of managing down a backlog of old cases with the measure of timeliness only crystallising at the point of completion.
‘For registration, UK applications are now being processed within the target time and the backlog of international applications is falling steadily as a result of increasing processing capacity.’
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