Aiming continually to improve

  Posted by: manpreet.boora      24th October 2017

Jonathan Green, Executive Director for Fitness to Practise Committee the General Dental Councilfunding comments…

The General Dental Council (GDC) is committed to developing a system of regulation that is fair and proportionate, and part of that involves improving our fitness to practise process.
To this end, on 7 September 2017, we launched a consultation outlining our proposals for an operational change to the case observations process, which is part of the Fitness to Practise process. The case observation process is completed by the Casework team when the GDC determines that a complaint or other information received about a nregistrant amounts to an allegation of impaired fitness to practise. The process provides dental professionals with the opportunity to respond to fitness to practise allegations made against them. It is a process focused on achieving transparency and fairness. The six-week consultation will give you the opportunity to share your feedback on the outlined change, which – if approved – will be implemented on 1 November 2017. So, there is still time for you to tell us what you think about our proposals.
Currently, during the case observations stage we will – in all cases – contact the registrant for their observations on the allegation. When the registrant has responded, the GDC will – again in all cases – return to the informant who made the complaint, and ask for their response to the registrant’s observations.
In most cases, comments provided by informants at this stage offer no new information, and tend to repeat the information first submitted as part of their concern. A lengthy fitness to practise process is stressful for both registrants and informants and the GDC is concerned that its current practice of always requesting observations from informants can add several weeks to the process without providing any benefit to the investigation.
The change we would like to make, would be to only invite observations from registrants in all cases. Informants will be invited to comment on the registrant’s response if the GDC Caseworker determines it to be necessary. The Caseworker will need to be satisfied that both the registrant and the informant have been given reasonable opportunity to comment and are unlikely to offer any new and relevant information. If the change is adopted, we will update our internal guidance to make clear the situations in which seeking informant observations is appropriate and likely to yield new information or where the informant’s direct experience of the events is particularly relevant. For example, where there are serious allegations of sexually motivated behaviour. Further details are set out in the consultation document.
The aim of this change is to shorten the case observation stage, therefore streamlining the fitness to practise investigation process.
The consultation period of six weeks, is shorter than the GDC’s typical 12-week consultation timeframe. This is because both patient and registrant groups have fed back that the fitness to practise process is too lengthy and stressful; there is therefore an obligation upon the GDC to take appropriate measures to address the timeliness and efficiency of its processes.