Tom Whiting, Chief Executive Officer, General Dental Council (GDC), speaking at the BDIA Showcase, Friday 14 March 2025

Tom Whiting today spoke at the BDIA Showcase, Friday 14 March 2025 (not checked against delivery)

Thank you for asking me to speak here today. I am Tom Whiting, and I have been the Chief Executive of the General Dental Council since June last year.

Since joining the GDC, I have recognised the need to look at ourselves from the point of view of the sector we regulate. Working in partnership. Recognising that in public leadership we have many common goals, and that while being respectful of our different roles, we must work together on the most pressing issues – for the patients and the sector we work in.

So, with those aims it has been a personal priority to get to know you, and the many people in the dentistry who we work with. We recognise the importance of constructive and positive relationships with dental professionals and all our stakeholders.

Being with you today at the BDIA showcase is all part of building relationships, sharing information, and collaborating to tackle our shared challenges. I know that we won’t always agree – but I am sure that we will agree on more than we disagree on and we will have many goals that we share.

Some dental teams have let me visit them where they work. This has been an opportunity for me to get to know about their work and for the GDC to learn too. I’ve visited a dental lab, dental schools and hospitals in Birmingham, Glasgow, Cardiff and Plymouth, high street dental practices, a corporate practice and community dental services. My thanks to all those who have made those visits possible – and been so welcoming and happy to share their thoughts and advice.

It is important to me to connect with the profession we regulate. To talk about our role and how we work and of course to hear about how we can be better. And to understand where there are challenges in dentistry, in oral health – and how we alone or, more commonly together, can tackle them. I have made this my priority.  

Today, I will talk about three areas that are important to me and the GDC right now:

• Being more outward facing
• Improving fitness to practise and addressing the fear it causes
• The GDC’s future priorities

And then I will end with my personal priorities and what you can expect from me.

Firstly – it is clear to me that we need to be more outward facing.

Dentistry faces many challenges. Health services more generally and many other public services face similar challenges or worse. We have a role to play in addressing those challenges. Our statutory purpose is to protect the public and we will do this better by being more outwardly facing.

Last year, for the first time we gathered data on the working patterns of dental professionals. This is an example of where we wanted to play our part in supporting the sector to better understand the workforce challenges and illuminate the public debate on the dental workforce. We now know more about the working patterns of dental professionals than ever before – the balance of NHS and private work – and I thank the professional associations for encouraging their members to provide their data.

Sticking with the theme of workforce, dental professionals who qualified outside the UK make an important contribution to the workforce, and the trend in recent years has been for their numbers to grow. This has put unprecedented demand on the Overseas Registration Exam at a time when we need more dentists.

Last year 53% of dentists who joined the register were UK qualified, 30% came through mutual recognition of EU qualifications and 16% came through the ORE.

We have high numbers wanting to register to sit the exams and we have high numbers registered to sit, waiting for exam slots. We also know that booking places is a challenge. 

In the last 18 months we have put in place additional capacity for the ORE. And now we must complete the procurement of new contracts to run the exams – and get them up and running with more exam spaces as safely and quickly as possible.  

I cannot say more about this while the procurement exercise is underway. But I do know how important this is to many of you here and you have my commitment to update you as soon as we can.

Refugee candidates for the ORE have unique challenges. They are often unable to return to their home countries to practise. They may find it difficult to access the documentation they need to provide us with evidence of their qualifications.

In February we announced that refugees will now have priority access to book exam places before the general booking window opens. Some have already booked places on the ORE. The numbers are small. But I am sure that many here will agree that it was important that we responded to their particular circumstances as dental professionals coming to the UK, even though demand for exam places is high.

Finally, on the theme of workforce – in recent months we have seen more interest from education providers who want to establish new dental schools. Now, you might hear that at the GDC we sometimes quote our legislation. And in this case the Dentists Act 1984 does set out that providers need to have what is called Dental Authority Status to offer dental degree programmes that lead to registration.

However, given the increasing interest, we wanted to make it easier for providers to know what is involved in requesting this Dental Authority Status. Especially because a range of organisations have an interest or will be involved – not just the GDC.

But also local postgraduate deans, local or neighbouring dental schools, the relevant government, the Chief Dental Officer, the Privy Council. So, we provided guidance earlier this year to help people to navigate the process – and we will continue to advise and work with any new providers who come forward

So, to summarise – in being more outward facing, we will:

• Continue to gather, analyse and share working pattern data
• Share information about the ORE when we can
• Continue to give refugee dentists priority access to book ORE places
• Work with those who come forward to set up new dental schools
• Listen to feedback and look at how we can do things differently and evolve

Secondly – we have got to continue to improve fitness to practise and address the fear it causes

I have heard this message through much of my own external engagement, as have my colleagues. And it is clear from our own research too.

There are two different things here that are each very important. The FtP process has to improve, and the impact of the fear that it creates has to reduce.

To improve FtP itself, we have already made some important changes, all achievable within current legislation. We are getting quicker – but there is more to do – both by us and others involved in hearings.

At the end of last year we changed our approach to initial inquiries – which has more than halved the time that it takes us to do the Assessment stage of fitness to practise – in primarily single-issue clinical cases. It reduces the time for assessments from around 30 weeks to 12.

I want to speak directly to all dental professionals now. The impact on the health and wellbeing of dental professionals during what we know can be a difficult and stressful process is of deep concern to us.

The adverse health and wellbeing impact of fitness to practise investigations can be significant and can affect patient care. Heightened stress can cause errors in practice, anxiety can lead to defensive practice, and stigma can lead to individuals leaving the profession either for a short time or permanently.

We all know that the actual number of professionals who are removed from the register is very low – around 20 each year. And these are the most serious cases – where of course as a regulator we have to act.

And further – the result of the vast majority of cases that come to us is that the registrant is fit to practice.

But we recognise that in what can be an increasingly litigious world, the fear of a process has a far wider impact than the actual numbers involved.

Some of the things you can expect to see from us this year are:

• Our people want to speak with empathy and help where they can. We are continuing to roll out training to all our teams, so they can have the right conversations with empathy. So they can respond when they see that a participant needs health and wellbeing support and signpost dental professionals to where they can get help.
• Making sure that decision-making by us and the independent panels of the Dental Professionals Hearings Service is proportional, fair and consistent. This year, we will provide updated guidance for practice committees – and all FtP staff and decision makers will also undertake unconscious bias training.
• Act on existing scrutiny and quality control – we are going to improve how we bring together insight from a variety of internal and independent sources and use this to make sure that changes are making a positive difference. This includes feedback from dental professionals and panellists, our internal quality assurance group, decision scrutiny group and internal audits.
• Sharing learning and information– this is a really impactful opportunity. The potential here is for us to share learning that can come from looking at our cases and make this available for the benefit of the profession and public we serve and protect. We want to do more to explain how different types of serious concerns are investigated, the types of cases that are referred to hearings – to build understanding of how it works.
• Supporting dental professionals – we want to support dental professionals to be fit to practise – by having teams trained to recognise when they need support, and in encouraging them to take action and remediate if a concern is raised.
• Look at opportunities to be more efficient and improve processes in how we manage cases at Hearings stage

If you ever study our plans – this work is under our two programmes of Improving Fitness to Practice and Case Management Improvements.

The second part of this issue is about fear. The key driver of perceptions of the GDC is fear – that we are punitive, out of touch and disproportionate. Fear matters because it gets in the way of effective regulation. If dental professionals – if you – are practising in fear of arbitrary and disproportionate regulatory intervention, you might practise defensively, spend time on excessive record keeping and limit your scope of practice. None of that is in patients’ interests. In fact, it is likely to reduce both the quantity and quality of dental care. 

​Addressing the fear and countering negative perceptions of the GDC is not a matter of reputation management – it is fundamental to our core objective of public protection. Reducing fear will come from doing what we do differently, and that being known and understood.

Fear also creates a lack of trust, which gets in the way of dental professionals engaging with what we are doing to improve the guidance and standards that matter for their professional practise.

So as well as the work to improve FtP, we want to improve understanding of FtP.

This means working with others to counter negative perceptions and help dental professionals to understand what we do and how we do it. It matters that the GDC is trusted by those we regulate, and it will not be trusted if perceptions are dominated by fear.

So, to summarise what we will do to continue to improve fitness to practise and address the fear it causes, we will:

• Provide more support, through training our staff and signposting to help
• Improve guidance to make sure decision-making is fair and consistent
• Act on scrutiny and quality control measures
• Make changes where we can within the current legislation
• Identify learning and find ways to share it for everyone’s benefit
• Work with others to address and reduce the fear of FtP

Thirdly, I’d like to talk about the GDC’s priorities for 2025 and beyond

The GDC has an essential role in setting standards – for the whole dental team and for education providers. This is what keeps patients safe.

We have an ongoing programme of reviewing and updating our standards and guidance.

Just over a month ago we brought together reporting requirements for what dental professionals need to report to us into a single, comprehensive document – covering health, criminal and regulatory matters. This new guidance started from 1 February.

We’ve just finished consulting on changes to the Standards for Education so expect to see revised guidance later this year – important to the future workforce.

We received valuable feedback from stakeholders on Scope of Practice guidance. We’ve done further work and met with organisations that provided feedback. I am grateful particularly to the professional associations and indemnifiers for their input. This is an example of the regulator making proposals, listening to feedback, and undertaking more engagement to make the end product clear and useful. I fully support that. You can expect to see updated Scope of Practice guidance later this year.

Also in 2025, our plans contain a number of what we are calling discovery projects.

We want to improve our digital capability. We have some catching up to do – but we need to modernise our processes and how people interact with us.

We have started work to learn more about what would be involved in implementing a new online registration process that is less reliant on paper. I want us to then follow with a broader programme to digitise more of what we do.  

The aim is to improve the experience for dental professionals accessing online services, such as registration and renewal, and help to increase transparency and build trust. It will make dealing with us more straightforward. There will be less need to contact us – in a good way.

One of our biggest priorities right now is to develop our corporate strategy from 2026 to 2028. This is a very important opportunity to set the direction and priorities for dental professional regulation, as well as providing the basis for setting the level of the ARF over the strategy period. 

Our primary focus is on the next three years but we will also be looking further ahead to 2030. Inevitably, we cannot predict the future – but we can at least be more confident that the choices we make for the new strategy are consistent with our objectives for effective regulation in the longer term.

We are investing too in our own workforce – we want great staff to come and work for us and to develop their careers with us. Who doesn’t? So we are investing in our training, our induction, our leadership and our culture. We have developed with our staff our new values –we are looking to be transparent, respectful, inclusive and purposeful.

Finally, the last point I will make on our future priorities is that we will support delivery of the government’s priorities for dentistry, where we either have a direct role or can provide insight to inform the debate.

The Minister of State for Care, Stephen Kinnock, spoke here earlier today.

I’m sure many of you are interested in the government’s priorities, as are we. And we stand ready to get involved. We will also continue to press the government to make the changes we need to legislation to enable us to make faster progress to more effective regulation. 

And as the Minister said,

The previous government presented proposals to amend legislation to provide for a new system of provisional registration for overseas-qualified dentists.  

We keenly await the outcome of the consultation and whether the government plans to take forward the proposed reforms.  

The proposals would allow appropriately qualified dentists to experience UK dental practice before full registration. We welcome the proposals – and know that others in the sector do too – but it is important to say that the sector needs to be ready to work together to design and implement a system that would allow provisional registration to work safely, effectively and sustainably. A legislation change is just the first step towards introducing provisional registration.

To summarise our future priorities, we will:

• Work with stakeholders to continue to improve standards and guidance
• Look to improve how dental professionals interact with us online
• Consult on proposals for our strategy for the next 3 to 5 years

My personal priorities

So, I’ll end now by talking about my personal priorities as Chief Executive and what you can expect to see from me in the next year.

It’s important to me that we continue to make the GDC a great place to work, for everyone, by focusing on our own people and our own culture.

That will benefit the people in the GDC who share your passion for patient safety. It will benefit the whole sector, because we’ll be more respectful, purposeful, inclusive and transparent.

In my previous roles in a local authority and police conduct, I learnt that the most complex problems (police confidence, teenage violence, knife crime, getting older people back on their feet after a fall) are tackled when leaders come together, recognise their shared aims and all are part of the solution. Often easier said than done. 

I am thinking a lot about what good regulation means.

I believe that a good regulator acts when they need to – but they work to make the profession stronger too – with a stronger profession the public are better protected – and they can be more confident. And a good regulator cannot do that on their own and without working in collaboration with the profession they regulate.  

So my engagement with the profession – wasn’t just about the first few months, it will continue. I want to continue to listen and build relationships – through meetings, events like today, visits to dental settings.  It’s who I am and how I want to work with the profession.

I want to be someone who you feel you can work with.

Thank you for listening. The GDC’s team is at stand K33 so come along if you’d like to meet the team or ask questions.