Tributes have poured in from colleagues and friends since the hearing on March 24, including British Dental Association CEO Peter Ward who congratulated Mr Gordon on his “tenacity and valour.”
Having gone onto the Dentist’s Register in 1954, Mr Gordon retired from high street practice in 1988. Since 1995 he has written dento-legal reports for solicitors. Although ongoing registration is not necessarily a requirement, he elected to stay on the register. When he came to meet the deadline for making his CPD submission last October, he lacked the evidence for 48 hours of non-verifiable CPD and notice of erasure was served.
Mr Gordon was told that if he appealed orally and failed, the Council reserved to right to ask for a costs order of £1,000 as well as the fees of their instructing Counsel at £250 an hour +VAT. For a brief moment, he considered backing down. In the face of a significant financial loss, friends and family tried to persuade him to accept erasure. But belief in his own case spurred him on.
In his appeal Mr Gordon submitted evidence of 441 dento-legal reports which he maintained involved reading and referencing the dental literature. He argued successfully this constituted “the other activities relevant to the person’s practice’’ under the legislation governing CPD. He was able to quote a section of the Civil Procedure Rules – the law for civil courts - which state that reports must be accompanied by a literature review.
The committee hearing the appeal said in their determination said that if Mr Gordon had attributed 15 minutes reading and referencing to each report and if this information had been provided earlier with his contemporaneous log of reports, the GDC would have considered it. The Committee concluded that it was ‘unfortunate’ that Mr Gordon did not provide this information to the GDC, and equally, that the GDC did not seek to ask him how much time had been attributed to each report.
Mr Gordon’s said afterwards: “To consider erasing a dentist over just 48 hours of non-verifiable CPD which has neither validity nor reliability seemed to me to be nonsense. It was my view that 15 minutes for reviewing the literature for each of the 441 reports I have written in the last five years equated to 110 hours which exceeded the 48 hours of alleged deficiency.”
“I went into the lion’s den with my eyes open. There was a risk I could have been humiliated, but thanks to my experience of advocacy I was able to cross-examine the council’s witness and present my arguments.”
Mr Gordon’s ability to manage his own defence can partly be attributed to the years he spent defending dentists on behalf of Dental Protection Ltd at service committee cases – hearings for alleged failings by practitioners working in the NHS prior to 2006.
He paid tribute to the committee for its fairness and the GDC’s legal assessor for her acumen.