Calls have been made for the General Dental Council (GDC) to take action to reduce the amount of time taken to process fitness to practise decisions.
This comes as a report shows the regulator failed to meet standards for timeliness in both fitness to practise cases and registration processing.
The Professional Standards Authority’s review found the GDC met 16 of the 18 standards. It found it is still taking too long to deal with cases and there had been no improvement on this since the previous year.
The Dental Defence Union (DDU) has said the findings are ‘not good enough’.
‘Highly stressful’
John Makin, head of the DDU, said: ‘This is the sixth year in a row that the regulator has found the GDC is not meeting the standard for timeliness of fitness to practise cases. That is not good enough and the GDC must do more to improve its performance.
‘The DDU is aware of a number of dental professionals caught up in protracted investigations. Not only are these delays highly stressful for individual members; they are not in patients’ interests, particularly at a time when there are gaps in provision.
‘We have raised this issue repeatedly with the GDC and hope 2024 will be the year when we see real improvement in this area. We also call on the government to play its part by publishing long awaited legislation which will allow the GDC to modernise and become a more flexible regulator.
‘Meanwhile, we are pleased the GDC’s latest guidance on professional indemnity cover not only reiterates the basic requirement for dental professionals to have access to adequate indemnity in the event of a claim, but also that colleagues consider the level of support they could themselves expect.
‘No one should have to face such stressful life events alone and the reason the DDU exists is to support members facing a whole range of dentolegal issues, including claims and regulatory action.’
Real improvements
However, the DDU said it welcomes the GDC’s updated guidance on professional indemnity cover, which comes into effect in February this year.
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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