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It’s absolutely possible that I’m the only person who reads the GDC update for dental professionals which comes out monthly, the most recent published on 10^th January.

If you go on to your GDC update or go on to the GDC website you can click on it and look at all the previous editions.

This one is really sinister and if you watch the train that comes through these, it becomes more and more sinister as we go along.

In last month’s edition, Bill Moyes’ blog talked about the use of evidence and an evidence base at the GDC that they were trying to create in order to ‘inform their strategy’ The outcome of this has been published now in this month’s edition.

The GDC has published some findings of a literature review carried out by the association of dental education in Europe and how this will start to inform their further development of CPD activities to make them yet more detailed and yet more onerous for the dental profession. This review will be carried out through a process of ‘consultation’ with the profession which will happen this year before they change the system again to make it yet more onerous and yet more difficult to record.

Get it wrong and you’re probably in trouble.

Try to read this stuff if you like, it’s turgid. The GDC website is vast and there is no chance that you have any opportunity to keep up with it. In fact, it’s probably about time that the dental profession was contributing costs towards someone whose job it was to keep an eye on the GDC on a permanent basis.

The GDC is now committed to a model of ‘upstream regulation’ and this is to be based on evidence according to Dr Moyes’ writings. So here is some evidence that they would perhaps like to consider…

On January 30^th2016 there was an online questionnaire released on social media which had been careful planned and calibrated.

The responses were validated by IP addresses and GDC numbers to ensure there was no duplication of response. The GDC numbers were validated to ensure they were dental registrants.

It was published for 7 days and in that time, there were 1496 responses. After careful selection that was reduced to 1468.

The statistical analysis carried out on the responses showed that the data was significant with a confidence interval (CI) of +/- 3.31%. That means that the results were valid on a scientific basis. This could only have been answered by GDC registrants who were aware of their GDC number and the registrants were overwhelming dentists.

One of the questions was the following:

‘Do you believe that the GDC is currently fit for purpose?’

92.5% of the dental population that answered that said ‘no’

The second question is even more sinister”

‘Do you have confidence that the GDC is protecting the public?’

81.3% of the dentists (the main financial stakeholder in the GDC) said that they did not believe that the GDC was protecting the public.

There were multiple other questions involved in the survey, every one painted the GDC in the worst possible light. This was three years ago.

This questionnaire and the results within it form part of the basis of my GDC lecture at the BDA Conference in 2016 and during that conference we did live online polling on stage with the same questions which showed the same, and even worse, results.

So, use that evidence Dr Moyes.

Use the evidence that your main financial stakeholder feels you are not protecting the public.

Why not repeat that survey, I dare you.

You can have all the details from me. My email address is: colin@campbell-clinic.co.uk

Why not repeat it publicly to show how good you are and to show what a difference you’ve made.

From your writing you clearly believe you are making a significant difference to protecting the public and if you were, the dental profession would agree on that.

The little conferences that the GDC are holding (almost in secret) where they selectively invite members of the profession to look at their ‘upstreaming’ are useless in terms of gaining the respect of the profession.

When was the last time that the Chair of the GDC addressed the dental profession in an open way to find out how they feel about his organisation?

We have several priorities as a profession moving forwards and the first is to ensure that when the time comes for a change of Chairperson at the GDC we put all the possible political pressure we have to ensure that it is someone who is dentally qualified and understands the significance of a hugely over onerous CPD recording system to catch what should be a tiny proportion of the profession.

The GDC are not making the profession better and they’re not protecting the public. They are chasing dentists out of the profession and promoting defensive dentistry and I have plenty of published evidence to show that is the case.

That’s where the GDC should be spending our ARF.

That’s the research that the GDC should be doing.

They should also be publishing how many cases they’ve had in the past 3 years where there was no case to answer and how those are a catastrophic failure of a process that simply isn’t working.

Blog Post Number: 1889