It’s been a while since the blog turned itself to the GDC (not that long ago I wrote about the indemnity issue) That is a different matter, this is real life stuff, something that has happened to one of my friends
So someone I know very well came to me to tell me that their wife, who is a Dental Care Professional, has been removed from the GDC register one day after their payment had not been received for renewal. The professional in question was on holiday and just hadn’t got round to phoning up to pay, and when they did 1 day late they were informed they had been taken off the register. They had to cancel a day list of patients because they were no longer registered to work as a dental care professional.
They were then advised to fill in a re-application form that would cost twice as much as the original registration fee to get back on the register for a simple administration error over 1 day.
Let’s get this clear, this is absolutely outrageous and a disgraceful way to treat people who are the main financial stakeholder in the organisation. This shows a complete disregard and lack of trust; it creates an environment of disharmony, disrespect and enmity.
This incidentally is not the case for the General Medical Council who have much more leeway for these small administrative errors. I know this to be true because at the same time I found out about this I also asked a patient who was in my dental chair, who happens to be a Consultant in Intensive Care, whether this was the case with the General Medical Council. He informed me that the same thing had happened to him. He had been given considerable grace in favour to pay, as they understood that life was busy, the world was difficult and sometimes people make a mistake.
Some time ago when I spoke to the BDA conference regarding my GDC case, where I thought some solutions might be brought to bear to repair the relationship that the GDC has systematically tried to destroy with the profession, I discussed the concept of legitimacy of authority.
One of the principles of legitimacy and authority is consistency. ‘The rules need to be consistent for everyone and pretty much the same yesterday as they were today and they are tomorrow’. So to apply such impacting actions for a simple administrative error to the registrants who pay the entire budget to the GDC is one thing, but to be able to waltz around scot free with the enormous administrative errors that occur within that organisation without any form of punishment is not fair nor is it consistent.
I am sure if we were to ask anyone representing the GDC to explain this situation where they erase people from the register immediately following lack of payment they would say that it was a safeguard for patients, protecting them and also ensuring that people understood that under no circumstances could they not pay their registration fee.
But of course this doesn’t tell the whole story. In the same way that when ludicrous cases are brought against registrants who then decide to leave the profession as a result of the pressure and the stress of such nonsense, considerably more patients are then harmed than protected by that action. (I have several examples of this that I will come to in a later blog) So when we erase ‘a person from the register for not paying payment after 1 day’ then the patients that they have to cancel are harmed by not receiving their treatment. They can be distressed by this or by their treatment being put back as a result of this. This of course would seem reasonable if the same actions and sanctions were applied to the GDC for their administrative mistakes, but of course that is not the case.
Within my case alone there were significant administrative mistakes including wrong letters being sent to the wrong address (that is outrageous) some letters being sent recorded delivery that didn’t require to be and some letters sent by non recorded delivery that absolutely were required to be. I received a phone call during my GDC case asking me to submit radiographs for the case so that they could be reviewed by the GDC expert only to inform the case worker that the x-rays have already been submitted on a specific date and signed for. I then received a phone call later on to say they have been found somewhere else in the office. Worse than this I was charged with dishonesty, misleading behaviour and deliberately misleading behaviour which was utterly questioned by the investigation committee as to why the charges had ever been brought because there was no grounds what so ever for such serious charges to be put in place. These are significant administrative errors and I would suggest that they are worse than forgetting to call and pay over the phone by 1 day. It appears that there is no sanction what so ever to individuals or the organisation as a whole. I’m not asking again for redress for the mistakes that were made in my case but what I’m asking for is consistency, integrity and respect to be paid. Not only to the professionals that work so hard to look after patients on a day-to-day basis but to the people who pay the fees of every single person at the GDC.
Yet again this blog will fall on utterly deaf ears if it even reaches as far as anybody there but it again raises one fundamental question. When will people associated with the General Dental Council (who ever in higher power that may be who is setting the agenda here) understand that a normally and proportionally functioning regulator can only exist when the person at the top has a significant experience of working as a Clinician? For the sake of clarity, when I say Clinician I mean a Dentist.
Blog post number: 1372
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