After sending ‘sexual communication’ to a police officer they believed to be a 12-year-old child, a dentist has been erased from the General Dental Council (GDC) register.
The dentist in question plead guilty to the offence of attempting to communicate indecently with a child. The conviction says they acted for the purpose of ‘obtaining sexual gratification or of humiliating, distressing or alarming a person whom [they] believed to be a child’.
Posing as a 12-year-old girl, a police constable communicated with the dentist via social media messages. A case summary and witness statements suggest that they ‘repeatedly’ sent ‘messages of a sexual nature’ during the exchange.
Following the criminal conviction in April 2024, the dentist was erased from the GDC register with immediate suspension in December 2025.
The regulator said the dentist’s offence was ‘of the utmost seriousness’ and ‘highly damaging’ to their fitness to practise. It also said that they had not ‘developed any insight into, or remediation of’ these actions.
‘Fundamentally incompatible with registration’
Another dentist was recently removed from the register after it was proved that he hit the head of a child patient and failed to treat them with ‘compassion and kindness’.
The dentist was found to have hit a child patient – known as Patient D – on the head on more than one occasion, stating: ‘Move head’.
In a witness statement, the patient’s mother said: ‘He used the palm of his hand to smack the side of Patient D’s head. It was quite a hard and aggressive hit, happening two or three times each appointment, before I intervened. It was noticeable that [the dentist] was becoming rough with Patient D, as he was frustrated that he could not get to the back of his mouth properly.’
In addition, it was found that he treated Patient D while suspended from the NHS dental performers list. The committee took into account that the dentist was suspended by NHS England in January 2021 and this appointment happened on 2 March 2021.
Whilst the parent of Patient D accepts that another dentist was present, she was adamant that it was the investigated dentist who treated her son.
The Professional Conduct Committee (PCC) found that the dentist’s conduct was ‘fundamentally incompatible with registration’.
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