Less than one week left to respond to GDC’s three-year strategy consultation

  Posted by: Dental Design      25th July 2019

The deadline to respond to the General Dental Council’s (GDC) consultation on its three-year strategy is fast approaching. The regulator is seeking views about the choices it intends to make, in the delivery of its broad statutory objectives, in the consultation which closes on Tuesday 30 July.

The strategy sets out a vision for the GDC to:

• protect patients while being fair to registrants, cost-effective and proportionate: by focusing on education and engagement, supporting career-long learning and promoting high standards of care and professional conduct
• work with the professions and partners to ensure that public concerns can be addressed by the right body, quickly and effectively
• use evidence, research and evaluation to ensure enforcement is cost-effective and right-touch
• ensure its approach to regulation keeps pace with change
• continue to build on the considerable improvements it has made.

This is a key moment for dental regulation and the GDC is calling on professionals, partners and the public to engage and support this work.

Although the GDC is clear that this is not a consultation on fee levels, it does recognise those levels are determined by the costs of delivering the Strategy and addresses the ARF accordingly. Due to improved financial control and cost-reduction across the organisation, and establishing greater clarity over the costs of regulating different groups of professionals, the GDC says it expects the proposed strategy to result in a significant reduction in the ARF for dentists and a very small increase in the fee level for dental care professionals.

GDC Head of Policy and Research, Rebecca Cooper, said:

“We have come a long way towards realising our goal of achieving a better, fairer system of dental regulation – as set out in Shifting the balance – but we know there is still much to do. The priorities we identified then remain very much at the core of our ambition for the next three years and this strategy sets out how we intend to fulfil our objectives over that time and the resource that will be afforded to each. This is a great opportunity to influence the GDC’s direction until 2022 and we want to hear from as many people as possible.”

The consultation can be accessed on the GDC’s website and the deadline to respond is Tuesday 30 July.