Annual Report and Accounts 2023

Message from the Chair and Chief Executive

We would like to thank our former Chief Executive, Ian Brack, who left the General Dental Council towards the end of 2023 after eight years. Under Ian’s leadership the organisation changed almost beyond recognition, and he established a strong culture of operational planning and delivery and the basis of sound financial rigour and planning. This rigour enabled us to reduce the annual retention fees for all dental professionals for 2024, to £621 for dentists (a reduction of £69 or 10%, compared to 2023) and £96 for dental care professionals (a reduction of £18 or 15.8%, compared to 2023). Each year the Council carefully considers and reviews the ARF level for the following year, and it will do so again later in 2024.

After Ian’s departure, the Executive Leadership Team continued to stay focused on our priorities, under the leadership of Gurvinder Soomal, the Interim Chief Executive. Following an open and competitive recruitment process, Tom Whiting was appointed as our new Chief Executive and Registrar and joined the GDC on 3 June 2024.

Tom joined us from the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) bringing the skills, qualities and experience needed to help us further develop trust and high performance as well as enhancing equality, diversity, and inclusion for staff, and in our regulatory processes.

Our priorities around public protection remained our key focus at the start of the first year of our Corporate Strategy for 2023 – 2025. Many of the stresses in the sector continued, however, with our own research showing difficulties for patients in accessing dental care, particularly NHS dental services.

Discussions about the dental workforce rose to the fore due to the access challenges patients were facing and we committed to collecting workforce pattern data to help to inform discussions about workforce. We did this because having a better understanding of the dental workforce will provide the profession with valuable insights that can help support future workforce resource planning.

With support from external stakeholders, particularly the British Dental Association, we invited dentists to provide their data on a voluntary basis when they renewed their registration in December 2023. We will invite dental care professionals to provide workforce data when they renew their registration in summer 2024.

Collecting workforce data was a good example of the work we undertook to support a new strategic goal for 2023 that recognises that risks affecting the public’s safety and wellbeing need to be dealt with by the right organisations. Also, in response to this goal, in late 2022, we started to bring stakeholders from across the sector into a Dental Leadership Network where we and they share challenges and issues with a view to finding common ground and ways we can work together. We held three events in 2023, with a wide range of speakers. The themes included developing the whole dental team, and the system from the perspective of dental professionals and patients and the public.

We saw changes to some of our legislation in 2023, which is an infrequent but welcome event, and one that we used to good effect, as it was the start of being able to improve the process for registering dental professionals who have qualified overseas. We increased the number of places on both parts of the Overseas Registration Examination (ORE) and consulted on new rules for registering dentists and dental care professionals from overseas.

We made some internal structural changes in the organisation, bringing together Fitness to Practise and Registration into a new Regulation directorate. The purpose was to enhance our resilience and efficiency and improve recruitment, flexibility and career development for staff and it is already showing results.

Within Fitness to Practise, the increase in the number of caseworkers in late 2022 helped to speed up our regulatory process, which contributed to the overall caseload at the end of 2023 being 31% lower than in 2022.

Independent Practice Committees from the Dental Professionals Hearings Service completed 91 initial hearings in 2023 (2022:85).

Of the cases awaiting an initial hearing (147 at the end of 2023), 47% started within nine months of referral, but the number which had missed our nine-month target stood at 70 at the end of December 2023.

We experienced a surge of applications from overseas dentists to join the register as a dental hygienist or dental therapist before the legislation change stopped this route to registration. We recruited additional resources to address this backlog, and by the end of 2023 over 2,000 applications had been assessed by registration assessment panels, resulting in over 1,200 registrations.

In 2023, the Registration function concluded 11,476 applications across all routes. This is the largest number of applications we have ever processed, and a significant increase on a previous maximum of 8,979 applications, completed in 2015. The time taken to progress all applications for all routes to registration improved in each area. However, the backlog of applications from overseas dentists to join the register as a dental hygienist or therapist remains and we will continue to focus on this in 2024.

Finally, as we we look forward to the rest of 2024, we are confident in our Costed Corporate Plan and that it will help us play our part in working with the whole dental sector to support the continuing recovery of dentistry. This includes legislative change around how we register overseas dental professionals. We also remain committed to improving our regulatory activities where we can in the absence of legislative reform, while always ensuring that the public are protected.

Looking forward, we are committed to continuing to engage with our stakeholders to identify the common areas that we can work on that help patients and dental professionals alike, recognising these are often complex because they cut across organisational boundaries. We want to build partnerships that help us to be a trusted and effective regulator, where we can all play our part in protecting patients and maintaining confidence in the dental professions.

The GDC sets the framework for professional regulation and ensuring patient safety. But it is dental professionals themselves who deliver safe and effective care to their patients and whose professionalism we support. We are deeply appreciative of all that they do.

Lord Toby Harris 
Chair

Tom Whiting
Chief Executive and Registrar

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