The process
The good news about receiving the GDC and the Dental Law Partnership letters in short sequence is that you can do a lot of the work once for the two streams of complaint.
It’s the time though and the emotion that it takes in order to put these things together, I suppose the benefit was that I was in lockdown, not having to see patients and just trying to keep a business alive that wasn’t making any money.
Through all of this time it felt brutally harsh that I was the person at the center of the GDC complaint and I was the first one to receive anything.
Four more clinicians in the practice who had seen the patient for whatever reason were also dragged in as were the defence unions, as were their case notes, as were their emotions, as were their stresses.
We produced a response to the initial complaint which was coordinated by me as the complaint handler, all went through the GDC’s online portal (very different to 2015).
In the next post I’ll tell you the difference between then and now but for now we put together everything we had, boxed it all up and sent it away.
For some of the clinicians involved it was there first time through this process, for others it was not.
The first one is the worst, that’s the one where it feels really unfair, that’s the one where it feels like a criminal charge (this is what I discussed in the previous lecture), this is the one where your very fundamentals are tested because it’s just not fair.
I had expected that because we were in lockdown and dentistry was closed and things had slowed down that this might go quickly and we might reach the next stage (whatever that would be) without too much of a massive delay.
I understood at this stage that it would go to a case examiner and I realise that a 72 page complaint worth £174,825 was going to take some unpicking but thought that there must be opportunity and scope for that unpicking to be carried out.
So we waited, received bit by bit GDC communication for 1 thing or another, identified now that more clinicians in the practice had been implicated in the complaint and got terrified that everyday you opened your inbox the letter would be there.
It’s worth at this stage commenting on the fact that the communication from the GDC was wholly appropriate.
The case handler involved was polite and reasonable and nice and non-judgmental.
There have been many changes to the process since I last went through this in 2013 - 2015 in an attempt to take the heat out of things and reduce the impact on the registrants until a conclusion is reached.
In one of the next parts of this series I’ll explain the difference and where I think the GDC are now in my experience first-hand but it’s worth at this point saying that they were represented properly and well throughout the process.
In the end it ran from the time the GDC contacted me for about 4 ½ months.
That seems like a reasonable amount of time to debunk this unbelievable and extraordinary litany of bile and inaccuracies and trumped up charges of mistreatment and dishonesty.
Following my submission of our case notes (with no further comments) I was not asked to make any further comment on the case except to vouch for my own clinicians and to say that they were people of good character with no difficulties at present.
On Friday 11th September whilst in a meeting with my friend and colleague Carl Dunstan in my office at work, an email dropped in from the GDC FTP case worker and I held my breath.
Worth explaining at this point that during this process I had also been asked to be a witness in another GDC case for a patient who had referred themselves to us following treatment at another practice with which they were unhappy (this is not uncommon) because of this I had been fielding GDC emails all-over the place so this could have just been one of those.
It wasn’t.
I opened the email which within it has a link for you to click to download a letter, the title of which was ‘case closure letter’.
My heart leapt, I downloaded the letter only to find that it was a letter regarding one of the other clinicians in the practice.
My position as case handler means that I get notification of the other results.
I spoke to Carl about it and we laughed (darkly) that I thought that I was out of the woods and we continued with our meeting only for another email to drop in exactly the same as the one above except on this occasion when I clicked it; it was addressed to me.
It’s fair to say I was staggered by the GDC’s response.
My practice and my team have been completely exonerated and validated in the way that they have dealt with the patient.
The complaint directed at me in essence was about our management of the complaint overall.
It was suggested that because the patient could not get access to me that this was inappropriate and in fact dishonest and this was utterly disputed by the GDC’s investigation.
It is wholly appropriate that patient communication is managed by your team to ensure they have prompt and appropriate responses and we had done everything in this case to look after the individual as well as possible.
I had found it difficult to believe that we would be able to have such a response as your case notes are forensically examined for issues which are deficient, following 18 months of treatment and in the region of 100 instances of correspondence we were found to be completely solid and that is a huge testament to our team.
It doesn’t mean that this process was easy but it does mean that we were vindicated and it does show that this complaint was utterly and completely vexatious.
This was an entirely different experience overall to the experience that I'd had in 2013/2014. From the attitude and behaviour of the case examiner, who was actually really nice to the overall tone; things felt very different.
The most important thing though is that my confidence was partly restored in the fact that even though a terrible and toxic and vexatious complaint can come in, it is possible that the process can work through that and reach a reasonable outcome and what we felt was care that had been delivered properly.
For the final blog tomorrow I’d like to talk about what seems different between now and then and how we can go forwards from here.
Blog Post Number - 2561
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