The report is the first of its kind for the GDC and covers a four-year period from 2019 to 2022. During this time, 20 dental professionals died while their cases were active, with causes of death categorised as natural, external, or unspecified, and one subcategory of suicide. The GDC has taken steps to ensure that individuals cannot be identified.
The report has included deaths in the subcategory of suicide when “suicide” was listed on the death certificate or notification. By convention, death certificates in Scotland and Northern Ireland do not use the word “suicide” or any synonym of it. Deaths that occurred overseas have been categorised as unspecified.
Toby Harris, chair of the GDC, said, “The report serves as a call for everyone in the dental sector to reflect on the environment, systems and processes involved in being a dental professional. It took longer than we expected to complete the work and some of the issues have been complex, but we have delivered process improvements in parallel and taken care to ensure we can be confident in the data reported.
“Every death is a tragedy, and when the data and what we are doing to improve FtP are put aside, what is left is the death of people, some in tragic circumstances, and we must consider the families, loved ones and colleagues for whom the pain and hurt are still very raw. We offer them our condolences.”
The GDC has prioritised improvements to its FtP process to minimise the significant negative health and wellbeing impacts of investigations on dental professionals. Improvements include revised communications and staff training. The regulator is piloting the use of initial inquiries to enable the assessment of clinical practice concerns earlier in the process and improve timeliness.
Rachael Bell, head of dental at MDDUS, said, “More work needs done to improve the quality of communication in the early stages and to minimise communication errors, which can lead to unnecessary stress to registrants.
“Further work is also needed to prevent the weaponising of the GDC by informants and to minimise the health impacts on an already stretched dental workforce.”
Dental Protection has said the long-awaited report by the GDC is a positive step. It has called on the regulator to ensure the transparency on this issue continues.
George Wright, deputy dental director at Dental Protection, said, “While this long-awaited report makes for difficult reading, it is the first step in understanding the extent of this problem and we see this as a breakthrough initiative.
“It also builds on other recent progress to improve fitness to practise processes, such as the review of correspondence sent to registrants during an investigation, the implementation of a pilot to expedite the resolution of simple cases, and the review into the amount of information released publicly when the Interim Orders Committee is considering fitness to practise concerns.”
He added, “There is however much more to be done, and we hope the much-needed transparency on deaths during fitness to practise investigations will continue, with regular reporting of this data combined with ongoing efforts by the regulator to further reduce the impact of its investigations.
“Reform to the GDC’s outdated legislation is essential to reduce investigation delays, which we know significantly impact mental wellbeing. Reform could give the regulator greater discretion to not take forward investigations where allegations clearly do not require action, so it could then focus on the most serious allegations and process them faster. The government must expedite the reform of the GDC, and Dental Protection will continue to press for this.”