Interim orders: are they wrong in principle?

Interim orders exist to protect patients, but when fitness to practise cases take years to conclude, are they becoming a punishment before the facts have even been tested? Jonathan Meadows weighs up the ethics.

I used to be the one asking for the order.

As a solicitor for the GDC and former head of prosecutions, my team’s role, amongst others, was to argue that a dental professional should not be working while the allegations against them were resolved. These days I sit on the other side of the room, defending them, and the view from that chair is very different.

Recent discussion of the impact of fitness to practise delays landed with me harder than most. Because the stress of proceedings, real as it is, is only half the story. The compound effect is starker: for many dentists, the career is effectively over long before a single factual allegation is ever decided.

Here is how it happens. A complaint is made about you. The GDC opens an investigation. You cooperate, you carry on treating patients, and nothing further happens. Then, perhaps within weeks, months, or even years later, you are called to an interim order hearing, where the GDC argues you pose a risk so immediate that you cannot be allowed to work while the case is resolved.

Nothing has been proved. Nothing may ever be proved. But from that day, everything changes. And the GDC’s new Fitness to Practise Statistical Report 2025 lets us put numbers on just how much changes and for how long. It raises a question the profession asks quietly all the time, and deserves to have answered out loud: is it ever right to restrict a professional before anything has been proved against them? Are interim orders wrong in principle?

What is the case for interim orders?