Bill Moyes, Chair of the GDC Council, publishes a blog following the October Council meeting

  Posted by: manpreet.boora      30th October 2017

New Council members

Yesterday was the first Council meeting with the GDC’s new Council members in a post.

The new council members include Anne Heal, Crispin Passmore, Sheila Kumar, Caroline Logan and Jeyanthi John- all formally took up a post on the 1st of October. Terry Babbs was reappointed and Margaret Kellett, Catherine Brady and Bill Moyes started their second terms.

This new composition coincides with a changing focus for the Council. For good reasons, much of the Council’s focus over the past few years has been overseeing operational improvements within the GDC. Bill Moyes published a statement where he said: “We have already improved our performance as measured by the Professional Standards Authority’s review of our statutory functions, and we hope further improvement will be seen in this year’s review. We will be able to tell you very soon what the PSA’s review has concluded about our performance against their standards.”

He continued: “The year ahead will see us developing a model of upstream regulation, as set out in Shifting the balance. This is an ambitious programme designed to improve the service we give to patients who refer complaints to us about the fitness to practice of their dental clinician, as well as to the registrants who are the subject of serious complaints.

“The key aims are to improve how we engage with dental professionals, particularly to help embed the Standards for the Dental Team and share learning from fitness to practise and other sources; develop and adopt a risk-based approach to how we assure the quality offered by education providers; and to develop our approach to continuing professional development (CPD) to encourage greater ownership of the scheme among dental professionals.”

The GDC are making improvements in their approach to CPD, with the launch of Enhanced CPD in January 2018 for dentists and in August 2018 for dental care professionals. The GDC received an update on the progress of implementing this at our Council meeting. Firstly, a reminder, the main changes to the scheme are:

– The requirement for all dental professionals to have a personal development plan (PDP);
– An increase in the number of verifiable hours for most professional titles and the requirement to spread the hours more evenly across the five-year cycle;
– The removal of the requirement to declare non-verifiable CPD to the GDC;
– The requirement to make an annual statement of CPD hours completed, even if zero hours have been completed for that year;
– The requirement to align CPD activity with specific development outcomes;
– The requirement for professionals to plan CPD activity according to their individual “field(s) of practice”.

The key update includes the suite of support materials that have been published to help to ensure dental professionals and other key stakeholders are able to understand the changes and what is required under the new system.