Yesterday was A-Level results day in England but this blog is not an opportunity to ‘cry into my milk’ about my own child’s results or to humblebrag either.
We celebrate the successes of students in England who have taken A Levels which allows them the opportunity to move onto some form of higher education or into employment with qualifications at an extremely high level as defined by the educational establishment.
And so, what does this produce that makes society better?
I spent part of Sunday morning last week on my laptop with the back doors to my kitchen open, the sun steaming in and my dog lying beside me while Callum and Louis watched Ready Player One.
Often, I don’t mind working from home and particularly when I’m working on things that I like and enjoy but that was not the case on Sunday. Bear with me on this…
I was working on two statements which had to be submitted by Monday. The first was one to the General Dental Council (as a witness after having seen a patient who had come from another practice with difficulties and problems, not in relation to my second GDC case. More about that sometime later), in this case I had been asked to produce a witness statement about what I had found when I had examined the patient.
The second was a witness statement after someone ran into the back of my car over two years ago (The night when my friend Dominic had been injured on his bike) which now looks like it’s going to court for the insurance companies! (I am a sh*t magnet).
So, to the first statement which had been returned to me by the General Dental Council paralegal on the Thursday before the Sunday requesting that it be checked and resubmitted by the Monday.
This statement had resulted from a one hour telephone consultation with said paralegal in which they asked the most inappropriate questions you can possibly imagine in relation to the case and clearly had limited understanding of anything to do with being a paralegal and certainly nothing to do with dentistry.
Having worked as an expert witness in GDC cases previously I understood that it was not my role to direct that interview but merely to answer the questions as asked and to make sure that the information provided was accurate.
I did my bit.
Soon after completion of the interview I was contacted by a said paralegal again to inform me that they had spoken to their GDC solicitor and they did not have enough information, so resulting in a further 45 minute telephone interview to try to get the correct information in relation to the case.
Following completion of this the statement was submitted for factual checking and this is the thing I was first working on last Sunday morning.
So, the statement …
Firstly, my address was wrong.
Clearly a cut and paste error.
This is the second time I have encountered this in a General Dental Council case and it is quite shocking.
If I wanted I could google the address which was put in place of my address and I bet it would be a practitioner currently working therefore implicating them in some sort of GDC case, therefore being a huge breach of confidentiality.
Also, the grammar in the statement was utterly appalling.
This might not seem important but I have been an expert in a case where the grammar in my expert report was criticised and I was utterly humiliated in front of the committee because I had ‘submitted a report which was of inadequate quality’ that was despite the fact that I had to submit the 62 page report in the middle of a course with one hours’ notice on a fax machine.
I was therefore keen that the grammar in this report would be correct and that was clearly not going to be the case if it was written by said paralegal.
Blog Post Number - 2459
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