One of the ways the General Dental Council (GDC) fulfils its primary purpose of maintaining public safety and confidence in dental professionals is through its quality assurance of education and training programmes which lead to registration as a dental professional. The GDC has published its review of that quality assurance activity for the academic year 2021-2022 (August 2021 – July 2022).
Over this period, the GDC:
- Granted approval to four new programmes (one dental hygiene, one dental therapy, and two dental nursing)
- Quality assured six dental care professional education providers and six awarding organisations through monitoring
- Completed the targeted monitoring of 15 bachelor of dentistry and 15 dental hygiene and therapy programmes, which were the outcome of a temporary process introduced to focus on education requirements at greatest risk during the pandemic
- Progressed work with the royal colleges’ speciality advisory committees to produce 13 updated specialist curricula, due for publication in March 2023
- Appointed 57 education inspectors to provide expertise in delivering our quality assurance function.
Gail Fleming, GDC head of education and quality assurance said, “The results of our education and quality assurance activity in this period highlight the high standard of education in dentistry. This has remained a challenging period for dental education and training as the sector continues to recover from the effects of the pandemic. Those challenges required both our own team and education and training providers to be flexible while also remaining focused on meeting the required standards, and I’d like to express my thanks to everyone involved.”
The full Review of Education 2021-2022 is available on the GDC’s website.