Initiate investigation
The British Dental Association (BDA) today has called on the Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, to initiate an urgent investigation into the competence of the General Dental Council (GDC) following a poor appraisal of its performance by the Professional Standards Authority, and the dental community’s outrage over a proposed 64 per cent hike in the annual retention fee (ARF).
In a letter to Jeremy Hunt, the chair of the BDA’s Principal Executive Committee (PEC), Mick Armstrong, highlights that the GDC must do a lot more to become cost-efficient than pouring more of registrants’ fees into a failing system.
“It would be wholly unjust and inappropriate to pass on the cost of [the GDC’s] inefficiency and mismanagement to registrants,” the chair of the PEC informed Mr Hunt.
He also wrote:
“Even more significantly, we have no confidence that even with a substantial injection of money the GDC would be capable of improving its performance.
“We are deeply concerned that the GDC is disconnected with the profession it seeks to regulate and ignorant of the real dynamics of the profession.
“It is the sum of the regulator’s failings that seriously calls its credibility into question.”
The full letter to the Health Secretary can be viewed here.
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