My goodness hasn’t it changed to be a dentist in the last 20 plus years?
A few weeks ago I passed 23 years qualified and the skills, knowledge and attributes required in dentistry, not required to be successful but mainly to exist, have grown exponentially since that time.
There is no point harking on here about compliance and requirements to be an expert, or the changes to medical emergencies in practice, cross infection, medical legal aspects or HR. Everybody knows about this and there has been plenty of moaning about it elsewhere.
It’s hard enough to be competent at your chosen clinical area (almost impossible I would suggest to be a competent General Dental Practitioner now days and these are the guys I feel most sorry for) but now the new ITI treatment guide, which is now twice the size than the one it replaces, has landed on my desk and an email which adds yet another area of expertise which we are expected to take on.
I always enjoy the ‘General Dental Council update for Dental Professionals’ which of course is not a light hearted read but a reminder of the strangle hold the regulator has on the profession. In particular in the most recent issue in July 2017 I was drawn to the dental insurance article.
It’s very clear (and when I say clear I mean not clear at all) what the relevant standard for the dental team says ‘you must have appropriate arrangements in place for patients to seek compensation if they suffer harm’. So we could dissect this in and out in as many ways as you like but to have arrangements in place for patients to seek compensation is different to having arrangements in place for patients to get compensation.
The most relevant part of this though is that the General Dental Council state that ‘the GDC doesn’t make specific recommendations or provide advice on the type or extent of cover registrants take out’.
Why is that then? Why is it that the GDC has abdicated responsibility of telling us what is an appropriate policy/area of cover or not? Why do they not specify exactly the people who provide these types of arrangements so it is easier for a General Dental Practitioner to be compliant; instead of insisting that the General Dental Practitioner themselves now becomes an expert in the provision of medical legal care or insurance.?
So here’s a thing, and let’s flip this round, wouldn’t it be wonderful if the regulator were to open a register for people wishing to provide medal legal cover for dentists and be specific about what was to be required in that cover?
People could apply and the GDC could let them on or not. If people were on that register we would then be safe in securing our cover from people only on the ‘an accredited list’. I’ll say that again, this is an abdication of responsibility, pushing back towards us when in fact it should be pushed back towards them. The GDC can take the responsibility for selecting companies or individuals who are appropriate for proving that level of protection for patients. That would in fact ‘protect the public’. In a week where a friend of mine is about to face a GDC full hearing for the most ridiculous of circumstances that I have ever heard, yet on Instagram I can go and get my teeth bleached in someone’s garage who’s not even a dentist, this small measure of the GDC would be an exceptional level of protection of patients.
This is a topical subject because the profession have problems with the defence unions at the moment and the fear of their ‘discretionary cover’, they also though see insurance companies and individuals coming into the market place which are considerably cheaper than the defence unions but are not absolutely sure whether they are in fact the correct cover or not. The GDC is a large organisation with a large annual budget, multitudes of staff and multitudes of expertise. Independent general practitioners are not this, yet the GDC’s role is to regulate those independent General Practitioners above all else. It is wrong to treat us as though we are all a ‘corporate’ because all that will do is change the market place and mean that dentistry is only provided by corporates.
Oh yes sorry, I forgot, isn’t that the over all agenda anyway?
Blog Post Number - 1363
Leave a comment